Of course, you never know with LL, but I think it is safe to say that Sansar will have facial expressions. The question is really how will they do them. Will they do them with bones, or strictly morphs. If with bones, then they would need a minimum of 15 facial bones. With facial bones, then any characters could have expressions, even custom made avatars. If they use blend shapes for facial expressions, then they don't need any facial bones. With blend shapes tho, LL would need to allow us to upload our own blend shapes in the fbx files, and then even custom avatars could have facial expressions. Of course blend shapes would be awesome for custom avatars, but creators could go crazy with them, adding lots of total data to each avatar.
Yesterday I was reading this thread "ask the CEO" and if I remember well Edde said that
- HIFI is a different program that will not be a part of Sansar (so maybe no facial expressions?)
- There will be a very flexible customizable avatar
- There will be many sceletons supported
- and something about user created avatars will not be customizable, I think?
That was a 19 pages thread, plus I have no idea about all this hi tech staff, so it is very difficult for me to understand.