Core

The pieces every FaceCue character has, whatever else it does. Nothing here is a feature you switch on. It is the layer underneath the drivers, and it is worth reading once because most of the confusing things about FaceCue are confusing until you know it is there.

What Is In This Chapter

• The Brain is the component every other part runs through. It owns the clock, keeps FaceCue and your animation out of each other's way, and holds the facts every driver has to agree on: which meshes carry the face, which shapes on them do anything, and what your game knows.
• Speaking and Listening is how FaceCue knows where a character sits in a conversation, and how you tell it.
• One Clock is how the whole face is advanced together, so a performance looks the same at any frame rate and you can cut what it costs without changing how it looks.
• Working With Your Animation is what happens when FaceCue and your animation want the same character: what keeps playing, what is added on top, and what is handed back.

World Inputs, the four things your game tells a character about the world it is in, is its own chapter: World Inputs.

Why There Is a Layer at All

Each driver could have found the head bone for itself, worked out which meshes carry the face, and tracked whether the character was talking.

Doing that five times over would mean five answers that could disagree, and the ways they would disagree are exactly the ways facial animation goes wrong: a mouth that thinks the character is talking while the eyes think it is idle, or an expression using a shape the speech driver never knew existed.

So it is resolved once, in one place, and the drivers read it. That single decision is most of what this chapter is about.

Validation

The brain's inspector checks itself and says what it found: which meshes it took as the face, which bone it took as the head, which drivers are present, and what each of them is missing.

It is worth a look whenever something is not behaving, because most of the time the answer is there. A driver with nothing to drive says so instead of failing quietly at play time.