Couple of days ago i discovered a video by chance. The video was more or less an ad for the upcoming Ozone application. Somewhere in the middle he showed a facial rig were he was using magnet modifiers instead of the usual bone rig for the cheeks. It looked amazing. Well, Blender has something similar with the Cast modifier. And since i used it already all over the place in my rig. Why not using it for the facials as well. I made some tests and really liked it from the start. Not only i get a couple of fps out of it, the best part is no more cheek bone skinning and its very fast to set up too. The whole cast rig is automated to the mouth corners but with tweak options of course.
This is the old rig. It worked. Automated with a lots and lots of drivers. The best frame rate i got in solid mode was about 10fps
This is the new rig. As you can see i got rid of half the facial bones, implemented the cast rig instead, got rewarded with volume preservation for free + 25 fps in solid mode, but the best part, i can rig and skin the face in half the time.
This is the default motion i get from the cheeks without any tweaks, no corrective shapes. Works in most situations but needs tweaking in some.
There are a couple of other nifty features which i plan to make a video about.