Facial expressions.

I have recently devoted a lot of time to trying to animated the facial expressions for my character, as I mentioned in a previous post I suffered a lot of problems trying to successfully animate the facial features. I have been looking at animating the face using the morpher technique, this technique simply transforms one object into another as long as it has the same amount of vertexes. So to do this I simply cloned the head of my character multiple times, changed the facial features and when the morpher was to be applied to the original head, and the modified heads selected as a target this should have allowed me to animate different expressions.
Unfortunately I found that I wasn't able to select a morpher object if it was an editable poly, so this meant I was unable to select just the head by itself. As I feel it is crucial to animate the facial expressions of my characters I decided I would detach the head and when it comes to animating and putting the animation together, I will just show close ups of the face so that the viewer cannot see the body.

So I begun created a series of different facial expressions with the heads I had cloned, I edited them via the editable poly mode and adjusted the vertices to suit the expression, I was only editing one side of the face as I thought it would be quicker to delete half the face and apply the symmetry tool, once I had finished creating all the faces I changed them to an editable mesh so that I could select them using the morpher tool. Unfortunately once it animating so that the face would morph into the selected face, because I had used the symmetry tool it would not work and this was the outcome:

For whatever reason the morpher tool did not like the fact I used the symmetry modifier when editing the heads, and it would not morph, so all the time I spent on creating and adjusting the other heads was wasted.

Fortunately in the end I managed to get the morpher tool to work, however the process took  lot longer because I had to edit the faces without using the symmetry tool.

Here is the final outcome and an example of how the tool works, I am very pleased with the overall outcome as I feel that the animation works nicely, with the use of the morpher tool it means that the facial expressions can be adjusted slightly or a lot, so the tool allows the user to control how much the expression is shown on the characters face, it also means that the movement in the face moves nice a smooth giving a realistic expression.