There many good points made here.
My decision to buy the faceware plugin was not because I thought it was going to create way better facial animations than the methods that are part of iClone.
I bought it because I thought it was going to make creating good facial animations faster and easier than through the other methods.
I haven't decided whether it was worth it yet because I'm currently spending most of my time creating content for requests as well as a Harry potter fan fiction video I am wanting to make for personal viewing. I haven't had time to check out the face puppet and face key methods yet. I have tried faceware a bit but having trouble with lighting to get it working effectively.
I am starting to wonder if I was silly buying it before trying out the new iclone7 facial animations. Hopefully, when I start my fan fiction video I will discover it is valuably faster and easier with the faceware plugin? 






i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

I do not understand why anyone showing a FW score gets beaten up.

Actually No one is beaten
All who post in a public forum must expect that there are people who have their own opinion about the shown results  and say it.

For me, it would also be important  to see a realy difference, if  I would  spend extra money for that.
But people are all different , and  at the end  the main thing is to have fun.


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liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

I agree. 
In this example, I think it should be better indeed if facial motion was edited with curve editor, but for a "non professional" user like me, it is enough 

https://youtu.be/NrmCzt7NTxg


     

I to was confused as to what to expect from Faceware as its expensive .i will copy paste below the best responce i got to my questions from freerange . Maybe they should call it Lipware as it seems the viseme is what its all about. You still have to do all the expressions manually in facepuppet.  Problem is people who post there work are just posting the raw viseme layer and not finishing the animation with a manual pass over with the facepuppet tool , so it looks bad and not natural. thedirector1974 is correct  we can do every thing Faceware does with the facepuppet and lipsync options already inside Iclone. Faceware is a big time saver when it comes to viseme which is useful for large productions i assume.

quote]freerange (11/6/2017)

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In professional usage face capture is never used raw in the end product, it always goes through cleanup and animation. Without the curve editor getting a solid facial performance in iClone will be super challenging. The viseme system needs a lot of work, or you have to do one of the crazy workarounds that use Crazytalk and a speech to text engine to get something close to accurate. Face puppet on it's own always looks procedural so unless you are adding a lot of keying work on it, it just does not look natural. 
No silver bullet, just time savers, and face ware is a big time saver.[/quote]

Did I do that?
It's not about the money or some jealousy about people who use FW in iClone. Is it wrong to expect some results from such a high priced software I couldn't achieve with key frame animation? I don't think so. There are some people here who use FW since it came out and there are only a view videos which show us results created with FW. And those results weren't bad at all, that's not what I meant. But I didn't see anything in those videos I couldn't do with key frame animation and face puppet. That's all ...

Direx

I think it’s just because most of us that have shown videos using FW don’t have results way above and beyond what you can now do with the new facial keys system. Not so much a knock on what we spend our money on, but more an expectation that such highly touted softaware wokld produce better results.

But agreed, it’s a learning process which we’re in the infant stages with really. I expect the time people spend with it, the better results we’ll start to see once we find out what works and what doesn’t. I know I fought with lips a ton on it!

My "NEWEST" Latest:)  Movie Made With Amaaaazing iClone


—> High Noon”ish” in Narrow Valley<—

I don't understand why everyone who shows some FW results gets beaten up...:unsure: 

I've said before it's a learning process, and frankly it's nobody's business how those who've bought FW spend their money. It would probably be much better to animate with pencil and paper than do all this 3D stuff and cheaper too.

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I think it’s capabile of a lot more, but we haven’t found the right way to use it yet. IMHO. Gotta keep tinkering!

My "NEWEST" Latest:)  Movie Made With Amaaaazing iClone


—> High Noon”ish” in Narrow Valley<—

     

I’ve only used it a few times. What I noticed is that there isn’t a whole lot of cheeck movement which would be great. If you watch Pixar films when the lips move so do the checks. There is tongue movement and that helps. The thing I’ve noticed so far is that it did capture some subtle eye animation that I wouldn’t have been able to animate myself using keys. It’s a scene where a boy is in the phone with a girl that won’t stop talking. He’s getting bored/frustrated and his eyes get bigger as she speaks on and on kinda like “get on with it already girl.” I couldn’t have animated that. Very subtle but I think it added a bit to the film.

For me FW meant speed. I do a bunch of 48hr film festivals and I never have time to properly animate faces given my timeframe. You can do a really quick first pass and get some decent facial animation in minutes rather than hours of keying. That’s the value for me. I’ll keep working with it and see if I can get better/more expressive results. It also has to do with the person doing the acting. You have to facially act out the part not just read the lines.its FW and that’s a premium product so I’m thinking there is much much more we can be doing with it once we really get under the surface. Just my 2 cents.

My "NEWEST" Latest:)  Movie Made With Amaaaazing iClone


—> High Noon”ish” in Narrow Valley<—