Remington Markham shows ways to incorporate shape keys for characters in Blender.

There are a lot of things that need to come together to create a functional and useful character rig. Likely the most important is bones, but next is a way to blend between shapes. In Blender, this is a shape key. Shape keys are a great way to create a facial rig, but they have other uses too.

Check out this new tutorial from Remington Markham who shows a couple of ways to incorporate shape keys into character work using Blender 2.8. A while back, Daniel Kreuter posted a detailed look into using blends for facial expressions in Blender. Check out that guide here.