Animoji | iOS library that gives access | iOS library

First, to clear the air a bit: Animoji is a product built on top of ARKit, not in any way a feature of ARKit itself. There's no simple path to "build a model in this format and it 'just works' in (or like) Animoji".

That said, there are multiple ways to use the face expression data vended by ARKit to perform 3D animation, so how you do it depends more on what you and your artist are comfortable with. And remember, for any of these you can use as many or as few of the blend shapes as you like, depending on how realistic you want the animation to be.

As you suggested, create bones corresponding to each of the blend shapes you're interested in, along with a mapping of blend shape values to bone positions. For example, you'll want to define two positions for the bone for the browOuterUpLeft parameter such that one of them corresponds to a value of 0.0 and another to a value of 1.0 and you can modulate its transform anywhere between those states. (And set up the bone influences in the mesh such that moving it between those two positions creates an effect similar to the reference design when applied to your model.)

Define multiple, topologically equivalent meshes, one for each blend shape parameter you're interested in. Each one should represent the target state of your character for when that blend shape's weight is 1.0 and all other blend shapes are at 0.0.

Then, at render time, set each vertex position to the weighted average of the same vertex's position in all blend shape targets. Pseudocode:

the "front" camera in the Xcode editor is an orthographic camera (its usesOrthographicProjection is set to YES).

Alternatively you can change the fieldOfView or focalLength properties to reduce the amount of deformation due to perspective. You can find an illustration in this post on the Photography site.

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