Concepts¶
The mental model behind FaceCue. Three short pages that explain what a bake is and why the performance still runs live, how language coverage is layered, and how the tool hides its depth until you ask for it.
Read these before the tool pages. Everything else on this site assumes them, and they are short.
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Cues, Not Keyframes
What a bake actually writes down, and why that makes the same line come out differently on different characters.
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Language Support
Ten tuned languages, fifty more supported, any language reachable. What a transcript buys you.
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Basic, Advanced and Expert
Three tiers, one selector, the same tool at three depths.
The Words This Documentation Uses¶
FaceCue names a handful of things precisely, and the rest of the site leans on those names without re-introducing them. This is the whole set.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Phoneme | One sound of a language. The unit a bake works in. |
| Cue | One timed instruction written by a bake. A phoneme cue says which phoneme, when it starts and ends, and how it was said. Emotion and cognitive cues are cues too. |
| Bake | The offline pass that listens to a recording and writes its cues. Runs in the editor, never in a build. |
| The performance | What the runtime does with the cues: the mouth, the eyes, the emotion, the head, the breath. The cues say what was said, the performance decides what it looks like. |
| Map | A character's translation layer, one per subsystem. It says which shapes on this particular rig stand for which target. Built for you by the OneClick Wizard, edited in the Face Rig Designer. |
| Recipe | One entry in a map. It names the shapes that make up a single target and how much of each it takes. The "ah" mouth shape is a recipe. So is a blink. |
| Driver | One part of the performance, running on the character. There is a driver for speech, one for emphasis, one for emotion, one for gaze and one for breath. Each can be taken or left. |
| Registry | Where baked cue files are catalogued so the runtime can find them by name. Covered in The Cue Registry. |
Two of these are easy to swap by accident. A map belongs to a character and says how that rig is put together. A recipe is one row inside a map. You pick a map per character, and you tune recipes inside it.