Detailed Tutorial - Mesh Blend Shapes on Skinned Mesh Merging In Unity
Using Mesh Baker Pro, here's a tutorial on how to blend multiple skinned mesh renderers so that they use just a single rig/skeleton and contain blend shapes that your animations can actually find. This is somewhat of a followup to my previous video, based on more recent findings of best practices.
Note that this is a complete walkthrough of a number of different steps, so it's helpful even if you don't care about blend shapes. In this case the blend shapes were from morphs in iClone 7, but blend shapes from other programs such as Poser, DAZ, Maya, Mixamo, etc, would also all work essentially the same way.
This is also setting up my character so that I can do hair cloth animation, or use the VertExmotion tool, without baking that skinned mesh into the main body, which would be undesirable.
This does require one small tweak to one line of code in Mesh Baker Pro, but in future versions may not. It's an innocuous little bit of code, and I show you how to make that one change near the end of the video; otherwise the blendshapes are there, but inaccessible to animations.