I like coffee and rigging. If there's a Venn diagram of that somewhere, this rig is in the middle. I wanted to make a rig that didn't rely on blendshapes for that "liquid simulation" feel. This is all joints and some interactive playback with particle simulation. You can find a tutorial on my youtube channel.
This is the 'Fernanda Rig'. There's a lot of effort being put into improving fidelity and making things as realistic as possible, but I think there is a lot of charm in 2D-inspired work. I decided to make a rig to experiment with the idea and used my own personal drawing style as a base.
I had to do an octopus rigging assignment in college, and one of the required specs was stretchy IK tentacles. There was no way in hell I was going to connect all those nodes by hand 7 more times, so I wrote a simple python script to make my life easier.
I once heard an industry friend say that a good auto-rigger is worth 100 good rigs. If a person can make all of this nonsense work through code, they probably know what they're doing.
I try my best to keep up to date with whatever is going on in the industry; that being said, FACS-based rigging is a must for anyone interested in high-fidelity face rigging. I gave it a shot with Wrap3 and really liked the results!