I’m using Unity 5.6. I’m working on our avatar system which builds characters at runtime and uses blendshape animations for the facial expressions. I’ve reproduced my issue with minimal steps below.
When I place a skinned mesh renderer in my scene with an animator controller, the blendshape animations work. I can see the blendshape weights changing in the inspector and the mesh animates correctly.
When I instantiate the same skinned mesh renderer into my scene (and call Animator.Rebind()) using all the same assets and hierarchy as the instanced mesh, the blendshape animations do not work. The blendshape weights do not update in the inspector and the mesh does not animate.
In addition, if I create a prefab of the first object and instantiate the entire thing at runtime, the animation also works. So, it appears to be directly related to instantiating just the mesh and adding it to the hierarchy with the animator controller.
Do I need to do something manually to get the blendshapes to work with instantiated meshes?