Preview and Scrubbing¶
Using the Cue Clip Composer as an editor-time previewer: play a performance on a character without entering play mode, scrub it, and choose which parts of the face are moving while you watch.
Assign a character in Brain, turn Preview on, and press Play. The character speaks in the scene view, at edit time, with no build and no play mode. This is where most tuning happens, because the loop from changing something to seeing it is a few seconds long.
Choosing What Moves¶
The Preview dropdown decides which drivers move the character while preview is on. It covers Speech, Prosody, Emotion, Eyes and Breath, and each is independent.
Turning things off is the point of it. A face doing everything at once is hard to judge, so watching the mouth on its own tells you whether the mouth is right, and putting emotion back afterwards tells you whether the two work together.
Why an Entry Might Be Greyed Out
An entry is dimmed when the character has no such driver on it. A character with no breath driver has nothing to switch on, so the entry says so instead of pretending.
Breath has one extra condition. Its driver also has to be set to its active mode, because a breath driver that is not breathing has nothing to show either.
The Character Is Always Speaking¶
While preview is on, the Eyes entry reads Eyes (Talking).
That is the window telling you which state it is holding. Eyes behave differently in conversation than at rest, and preview asserts a speaking character throughout, so what you are watching is the talking behaviour rather than an idle one. The label changes back when preview is off.
It matters because the eyes you see here are the eyes of a character mid-line, which is the version worth judging when you are working on a line.
Play, Pause and Scrub¶
Play runs the clip forward with audio, and the character performs it.
Dragging the playhead scrubs, and the face follows to wherever you put it. Single-clicking a cue in the Visemes row scrubs to the start of that cue, which is the quickest way to land on a particular sound.
Playing it forward is the one to judge by. Time is really passing, so everything that depends on time behaves the way it will in your game.
Scrubbing and pausing are close, not identical. A held frame has no time passing in it, so anything that works by easing from one value toward the next has nothing to ease across and shows you the underlying pose instead. The difference is usually small, and it tends to make a paused frame look a little sharper than the same moment does in motion.
Breath is the exception that gets special handling, because it is a cycle, not a pose, and a frozen one would be misleading. FaceCue re-runs it up to wherever you have landed instead of leaving it wherever it stopped.
Judge a Line by Playing It
Use scrubbing to find a moment and to check what the cues are doing at it. Use playback to decide whether the line is right, because smoothing and settling are part of how it will look and they only happen while time is moving.
If a paused pose looks harsher than you expected, play the clip before changing anything.
Previewing in Isolation¶
Two habits are worth having.
Watch the mouth alone first. Everything else is layered on top of it, so a problem in the mouth reads as a problem everywhere. With Emotion and Eyes off, what is left is the line itself.
Then put one thing back at a time. A face that looks wrong with everything running is hard to diagnose, and the driver that is causing it is usually obvious the moment you switch it off.
The Sweep¶
Some rows are read out of the cue files. The rest are stages in a computation, and the window has to run that computation before it can draw them.
Sweep is that run. It plays the whole performance and samples it across the clip, then fills in everything that is computed instead of stored.
That split does not follow the tiers. Final Output is computed, so the row that tells you what actually lands on the face needs a sweep as much as the deep rows do, even though it is there at Basic. What does not need one is the material read straight from the files: the waveform, the words and letters, the cues themselves, and the two authored timelines.
Auto keeps it current. With it on, FaceCue re-sweeps by itself when something that would change the result changes, on the interval beside it, so tuning a setting and looking at the rows does not need a button in between. Leaving it on is the reason most people never think about sweeping at all.
Export writes out what the sweep produced, so it wants one too.
An Empty Computed Row Is Telling You Something
Sweep results do not survive a script recompile, so the computed rows go blank after one and come back on the next sweep. With Auto on, that happens without you noticing.
If they stay blank, the sweep is not failing to have run, it is unable to run, and FaceCue says which of the two reasons it is: no character assigned, or a character whose mouth shapes have not been mapped yet.
The Tuning Loop¶
The reason all of this is in one window is the loop it makes.
Change a recipe in the Face Rig Designer or a setting on the character, come back to the composer, and the change is already in what you are looking at. Play the line, judge it, change it again. No build, no play mode, and no waiting for a bake, because none of this re-bakes anything. The cues are what they were. What changes is what the character does with them.