Let me say to address your issues, Ed, that I've found adding expressiveness to such automation as Acculips is best done with mocap.  I think that's the best of all possible worlds - you generate the visemes with Acculips and add emotion through any of the four possible facial mocap solutions offered (oddly enough I own them all.  Sigh).

Alternatively, you can do the mocap first and add the Acculips afterwards - in either case you simply adjust the amount the visemes control over the lips (or vice versa).

This has been my basic facial animation approach for a long time now.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

@Kelleytoons
you made me curious about "transformer", what exactly is that ?.