A "Misthycal" Halloween | Blender Facial Mocap

Sometimes you will see I make a very different kind of artwork.
That’s because I often join or host 3D challenges with my friends on Discord.
The theme this time is Sport, so I went with E-Sport 😆 — because she’s playing League of Legends. Maybe a bit cheating, but I think it still fits.

The character is based on Misthy, a famous streamer I used to watch a long time ago — actually the only female streamer I watched. Her name also fits the theme perfectly, so I really wanted to make this piece.

I started by building a rough 3D model of her from photos online, then imported it into Unreal Engine 5. Using MetaHuman, I recreated the head with geometry that works correctly for facial expressions in UE.
Because UE expressions use bones instead of shape keys, I exported the 52 ARKit poses to Blender, then baked all those poses into shape keys — this step is very important because the Face It mocap system in Blender needs them.

For the facial mocap, I used the Face It add-on.
Since my model already has all 52 shape keys, it works perfectly with the system.
I used a YouTube video of Misthy playing games, then ran it through Face Landmark Link (from GitHub) to turn it into mocap data.
That data tells which expressions to use at what time, and I imported it into Face It to drive the animation.

It sounds complicated (and it really was 😅).
I spent about 4–5 days testing and learning how to get the MetaHuman export to work properly. But once I figured it out, I could probably do the same thing again in one sitting.

Everything else — wind, lighting, and small effects — I made with Geometry Nodes and Shader Graph.
The hair uses Swingy Bone and a little Displace modifier for soft movement.
I rendered three versions: normal, lightning, and lightning with some haunting dolls behind her, then mixed them together in DaVinci Resolve — fast and non-destructive workflow.