Dealing with facial expressions: My character sometimes looks as if he is someone else

Dissendior

I realised that sometimes when I use facial expressions from products my character that I've created with some morphs and some custom adjustments looks very different. It's really like in one shot he seems to be another person when I use a facial expression.

I hoped / thought that a pre-defined facial expression pose / morph would help me saving some time and work but for some combinations of characters / expressions it seems that they loose their characteristics./ attributes / features.

While I am writing down this post it comes into my mind that this may not be so strange. Depending on the base figure that the expressions were made for it may not fit to another character's face. I just wonder how you folks deal with that: How do you make your figures laugh, speak, looking angry etc.? Which tools do you use? Do you pose the face in PowerPose every time for every character newly? Do you create a set of expressions for your own character?

crosswind

Haha ~ that's one of the "features" of  most Daz expression products, which make your characters look different even weird to some extent. As you said, expressions made with Base figure won't work really well on other non-Base characters, esp. heavily-customized characters. 

The trick is either not to dial 100% of the expression control properties (more or less 5% ~ 50%, if you mix expressions, even lower down the %) or carefully dial Base Pose Head and FACS expression properties yourself.

I sometimes even send the character to Blender to finetune / smooth some details... I rarely create expressions but just save Property Presets (poses + shapes).

Dissendior

thank you for your response!