Les-

That's the way we do it in XSI. Bones for the jaw and the eyes, occasionally another two or three bones for the eye-lids, if the animation requires it, connected along a dummy root to the head center, so they track properly.

Generally speaking, you only need to set the rig up once for each basic character "type" (male, female, child, dog, etc. ), then you keep the rig and attach it to your new geometry, unless the new character has special rigging that needs to be considered.

But, as per my earlier comments, if the rig isn't taken into consideration, then the mesh won't have the proper topology to implement blendshapes over the bone structure.

DAZ's characters weren't built this way, so you'd have to do a lot of extra work to make them look good with the new bone set-up, and many of your old morfs would be incompatible with your new rigging.

If you build a scratch character like this, it's not hard to do, and has definite advantages, but most Poser developers who specialize in character design and facial morfs/expression morfs might not like having to rethink their old habits (you'd have to ask them).

Additionally, you have to consider that most users will be resistant to the idea of mixing morf and pose techniques on facial elements. It doesn't seem like a big deal to us but the average user may feel differently, as they'd be forced to access stored poses or pose controls for general facial movements, and a separate set of morf controls for expression and musculature alterations.

Finally, any character made in this way would lose MIMIC support, which, if I understand correctly, is considered a big deal to animators. Would Poser animators be willing to trade the realism of arcing facial movements (which can be convincingly faked with morfs) for the convenience of Mimic, which saves them a ton of time? You'd have to ask them.

Again, I'm not trying to put a damper on the idea... it's one we implement every day, and believe is superior for a lot of uses. But I think that you need to evaluate the risk versus reward of doing this carefully. ( which is what this thread is about, right? ) :)

If anyone wants help doing it, we'll be glad to help them out as best we can. We're coming from an XSI background, and Poser's rigging is still pretty unnatural to us, but the principles cross-apply regardless of the application, and we have a ton of source material for rigging and animation that we can share.