wtf is arkit-pose-recorder-for-blender?

This is an addon for Blender, the free 3D modeling program, aimed at people who rig and animate character faces for games or animation. It helps you build the 52 standard ARKit face shapes, the set of facial expressions Apple's face tracking system uses, by posing a character's face bones directly rather than sculpting the mesh by hand for each one. Once you have posed and saved a shape, the addon can bake all of them into real shape keys on the mesh in a single step. The workflow starts by picking the face armature, meaning the bone rig, and the face mesh that will receive the finished shapes. The 52 ARKit shapes then show up automatically in a list inside the addon's panel. For each one, you pose the relevant bones in the viewport by hand and click Save Pose, and only the bones you actually moved get recorded, so you do not need to touch every bone for every shape. A preview button lets you recall a saved pose to check it, and a reset button returns the rig to its resting position without losing any saved data. A useful feature is left and right mirroring. Many face shapes come in pairs, like a smile on the left side and a smile on the right side, and the addon can reflect a saved pose from one side to its counterpart using the bone's own natural orientation rather than a simple flip. Saved pose data can also be exported to a JSON preset file and reused on other characters that share the same rig and bone names, so the work only has to be done once per rig. Each shape's description panel can show an animated reference GIF explaining how that expression should look, though this feature needs the Pillow image library installed into Blender's own bundled Python rather than the regular system Python. Everything else in the addon works without that extra step. The project targets Blender version 4.0 and above and was tested on version 5.1. The author credits an existing VRoid blendshape reference project and a related Google document for background information used in building this addon.