December 12, 2016 Update
Added 2016-12-12 20:25:02 +0000 UTCThis week I've been in search of a more beautiful face. The currently released version uses blendshapes for all the face deforms. Expanding on this has proven to be extremely limiting, frustrating and tedious.
I spent several days on it trying to set up the blendshapes so the face resembled a particular celebrity, who's well known for her beauty. It was a tremendous disaster that shouldn't see the light of day. Everything I did simply made the face look more wierd.
An MMO called "Black Desert Online" is reknown for it's fantastic character creator and beautiful models. I picked up a copy and dumped a fair amount of time into it. It's a great game, and while the character creator has great depth, I found the interface rather clunky. Point being, I am 99% sure that the face uses bone based deforms. This is what I have transitioned to.
Here is an images showing most of the bones for the face. (Ears not added yet).
They follow a heirarchy. So you can start at the whole face and work your way down through major features: Nose, Eyes, Forhead, then to the smallest details such as the Philtrum, Cupid's Bow, Tear ducts, Septum, etc. Honestly a significant part of this was figuring out what to name some of the bones.
Each of the bones is able to translate, rotate and scale. This grants WAY more freedom than me manually going in and setting arbitrary blendshape limits. There's a lot of work to do here still, but I'm expecthing that this will allow the resemblance of basically any face.
