This is a quick and dirty test!!
I'm working on a new method for doing facial setup using wire deformers. Simply put, wire deformers are amaaaaaaazing. I haven't used them before, but I just realized they are like... easy to setup joint chains with auto-aiming that you get for free, and weights painting that's made easy. You just draw a curve, assign it to an object as a wire, paint the wire weights (easily, with a lot of creative freedom), and moving the curve's points you deform the object. And it just works! I'm testing the numbers of curve control points that would be ideal for specific deformations at the moment. The idea is to have as few points as possible, so you work fast and easy with them, and also get smooth deformations. The more detailed the curve though, the more control you have over the detail... This kind of setup works great for cartoony stuff, because it gives you shape control. Someone was smartly suggesting on a forum that you can use wires to make "blendshapes" out of them. Instead of sculpting points, you sculpt the face easily with a few curves. It's faaaaaast, completely flexible, and the deformations have nice falloff, unlike blendshapes.
I've scripted some stuff here to automate the creation of face controls (draw curve, click, boom!). Each point on a curve gets a pair of controllers basically, a parent and a child. A third, base controller, is hidden, and it's direct-connected to the control points of the curve. I learned this trick from Raf Anzovin (check out the Face Machine thread on cgtalk). So I'm not using clusters!! Oh yeah!!
I'm using the parent to set up SDK overall shapes, like AUs (smile, mouth open, etc). And the children for freeforming the face during animation, which was the main idea of this setup, and it's insanely cool. And liberating :D
I'm working on a auto-setup, so I can rig a face in like... a day, or less, I hope. With complete freedom over the face curves, so one can rig ANY kind of face, a dog, a monster, an alien, Tom and Jerry... any face! Well, I don't know how well it would work with realistic faces. The setup would have to be more detailed, and rely more on SDKs, mocap... Anyway, since the toolset from Artificial Actors is using joints on the face... wires should work even better, because they also orient themselves smoothly along a chain, while the joints on the AA's toolset are only translating, not also rotating, which leads to terraces in the deformation - when kept subtle and with added blendshape corrections, it's ok, but those joints, set up like that, you can't move around freely and expect correct deformations.
This is how I've laid out my curves on this green face that looks a little like Marlon Brando... haha, but only when you raise the chin... not in its default pose. Not my model, I wish I could credit the guy... I once downloaded a bunch of free models from a website, really cool, cartoony stuff, but I don't remember where from. If the author sees his work here, could he please contact me... :D
So these deformations here are 100% messing around with these 11 wires on the face, no corrective blendshapes. I think I'll use only one wire instead of 2 for stuff that's left-right. Easier to paint. The nose should also, maybe, have a more straight wire, not a curvy one. Round margins don't behave so well, reason why I used 2 wires for the lips, not a circle. Same with the eyelids. Oh, I've geometry constrained the eyelid controllers to the eyes - although on a more serious setup I'd make a slightly larger dummy object for each eye and geo-constrain to that, I think... Each curve has around 4-8 control points. Each wire is assigned to a separate mesh!! That's important! The meshes are then added as blendshapes to the base head (all done with a click/script). If you add more than 1 wire to one mesh... for some reason, they get really slow. I've tried all kinds of workarounds, the only one that worked was this, unfortunately, because it's not ideal, you have to keep all the duplicated meshes in your scene :| Well, if you reference the character for animation it's OK.
Next step now is to decide a number of really necessary facial AUs, and make an auto-setup, so that I only have to lay out controllers, click, sculpt corrective blendshape (to add more precise creasing, etc.), click, done. Something like that. This should actually the bulk of working with this setup, because drawing wires and painting their weights is a breeze. Half an hour stuff. I'll probably use the AA's Corrective Blendshapes Manager. Or I could script my own manager - for Wolfy I've done it by hand, not with AA's CBS.