Live Link Face vs Steam Audio SDK

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.

Steam Audio SDK is a free toolkit for adding spatial audio to games and VR/AR apps. It renders positional audio binaurally using HRTFs to model sound direction relative to the listener. Environmental features include physics-based sound propagation, occlusion, reflections and reverb. The SDK can spatialize Ambisonics audio and rotate it with listener orientation, and developers can provide HRTFs in AES SOFA format. Multicore CPUs and supported GPUs can accelerate environmental simulation and rendering. Listed integrations include Unity, Unreal Engine, FMOD Studio, Wwise and a C API. The C API is intended for custom game engines, audio middleware and digital audio workstations, and can be called from languages that use external libraries. Supported systems include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS; SteamOS is also listed as a runtime platform. Integration requirements include Unity 2017.3 or later, Unreal Engine 4.27 or later, FMOD Studio 2.00 or later and Wwise 2023.1.0 or later. The project describes its development tools as being in Beta. Steam Audio is available free to developers, subject to a license agreement.