Hi All,
I’m working with Blend Shapes in Unity the first time and have to find out if it is usable for mobile. I’m trying to find out how much a Blend Shape cost, what influence it has on the performance. F.e. if one Blend Shape doubles the vertex number, doubles the draw calls etc. I am right now searching the web and start doing some tests myself but I thought perhaps you got already some experience yourself and we could use this thread to share our experiences.
Sincerely, AMess
Well… it depends on the specific case.
As a general rule, they are a bit ram heavy, but they perform pretty nicely otherwise.
Why don’t you test and let us know? 
I found this slide show BlendShape & Tails Manual | PPT
from Matumit Sombunjaroen, Managing Director at Zodiac Alliance Digital Entertainment
He tested the performance differences between a whole character mesh with blend shapes and splited the mesh with blend shapes. Apparently the performance difference is very low.
“Morphing is very fast so any form of character you would normally have in a mobile game can have morphs with multiple channels running with very little impact on performance. For example a character of 1000 vertices with a complex Bend modifier (lot more CPU intensive than a morph) takes 7ms on an older Android phone, morphing would easily be less than half that and if you have a multi cpu device you can turn on threading support.” by SpookyCat
__https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/q84zm/easy_to_use_super_fast_and_advanced/__
Answer to the question “Blendshapes or bone based facial rig?”:
“Either method is acceptable. Morph targets use less CPU/GPU. But bones use less memory. I’ve used both methods in game development.” by monster: __http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=99758__
Relying on comments that were made three years ago doesn’t make sense for mobile platforms, because the devices are being improved in an outstanding pace and also Unity was significantly changed. If you want to know how well your use case works on mobile devices, there is exactly one advice: Try it out!
This is a question regarding iClone to Unity Pipeline…
iClone can be used to animate character using
The resulting animation can be transfered to Unity3D as an FBX.
My question is Can the animated FBX from Point 2 i.e Body Bones + Facial Morph Targets be employed for NPC to tell stories in between game play ?
The reason I ask is that I had read somewhere that Morph Targets can impact performance. Is the performance issue applicable only for the Morph Targets animated within Unity3D or the performance issue is also applicable for animated FBX that were animated using iClone.
Please Advise.
Thanks and Regards