What is the ARKit 52 Exporter?
The ARKit 52 Exporter bakes all 52 ARKit facial poses from a MetaHuman face mesh into individual OBJ files on disk. It does this by running the ARKit animation asset frame by frame, capturing the fully deformed vertex positions via CPU skinning at each frame, and writing the result as geometry.
This is the starting point for the Blender round-trip workflow: you take these OBJ files into Blender, merge them as shape keys onto the neutral mesh, do any sculpting or re-rigging you want, then export back to Unreal as a morph-target face.
Note
If you don't need to sculpt or customize the mesh, the Face Optimizer produces the same end result in a single click without ever leaving Unreal Engine.
The 52 ARKit Poses
The 52 poses are Apple's standard ARKit face tracking blendshape set (eye blinks, jaw movements, mouth expressions, brow raises, cheek puffs, tongue, etc.).
The plugin also exports the neutral (bind) pose as a separate file (Neutral_LOD{N}.obj) which becomes the base mesh in Blender. Together with the 52 expression poses, that gives 53 OBJ files per LOD in total.
The Full Round-Trip Workflow
UE: Bake ARKit Poses → 53 OBJ files on disk (Neutral + 52 poses)
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Blender: Run MergeArkit.py → one mesh per LOD, each with 53 shape keys
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Blender: Edit mesh or adjust shape keys (optional)
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Blender: Export as FBX (scale 100, no armature)
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UE: Import FBX → morph-target-only face mesh
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UE: Reassign MetaHuman materials → drive with ARKit Live Link
Each step is covered in detail in the following pages.