Live Link Face vs SoLoud

Live Link Face captures facial performances and generates animation for MetaHuman characters in Unreal Engine. The iOS app supports real-time and processed animation and can capture raw video and depth data for the MetaHuman plugin. Epic describes the Android app as a beta for real-time MetaHuman facial animation. Animation streams over a network to Unreal Engine through the MetaHuman Live Link plugin; the phone and computer must be connected to a network. App settings include OSC connections for external controllers and devices. Android timecode can use the system clock, an NTP server, or a Tentacle Sync device for multi-device synchronization. Real-time Android animation is limited to certain Qualcomm chipsets, and Snapdragon 8s chipsets are unsupported; Android does not support capture for offline processing. Live Link Hub can download recorded media from Android and iOS devices and trigger recording on a connected phone. The app is free on iOS and Android. The App Store listing requires iOS 16 or later, while Epic’s workflow description specifies an iPhone 12 or later and a Windows 10/11 desktop PC.

SoLoud is a free, portable C/C++ audio engine for games, built around a fire-and-forget playback interface. Playback handles let developers adjust volume, pan and relative speed. The engine includes multiple voices, faders, real-time filters, mixing busses, gapless looping, queued sounds and atomic operations for several sounds. It supports 3D positional audio and up to eight surround speakers.

Supported sources include several WAV variants, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, tracker formats and emulator sources. The package includes speech synthesis and an Sfxr sound-effects synthesizer. SoLoud runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and the web through Emscripten, with backends including SDL/SDL2, MiniAudio, ALSA, JACK, OpenAL and WASAPI. A C API DLL provides access from environments including Python, Ruby, C#, BlitzMax and GameMaker Studio. Its ZLib/LibPNG license permits commercial use, modification and redistribution subject to attribution and source-notice conditions. The project notes limited engine integration and no artist tools.