Mental State¶
What is going on inside a character, as the two things the eyes read: whether it is thinking, and how worked up it is. Where each comes from, what reads it, and where to see it.
Speaking & Listening is about where a character sits in a conversation. This is the other kind of state: what the character is feeling and doing with its attention at this moment, resolved on the brain and read by the eyes.
Thinking¶
Concentration and recall: working something out, reaching for a word, holding a thought. A character thinking looks away from whoever it is talking to, blinks less, the way people do when they are working on something, and its pupils widen a little.
It comes from the lines, or from the Timeline. A <Thinking> tag in the transcript, around the words where the character reaches for the idea, sets it for as long as those words last. Written on its own as <Think/>, the tag marks the moment instead, and the thinking lasts as long as the look away it brings. Nothing infers it. A line without the tag never thinks hard on screen, however the words read, so it is worth marking the moments that matter. In the Cue Clip Composer the same moment is a Thinking marker on the Cognitive Events row, where it can be moved or added by hand, and a phrase's marker lengthened.
In a cutscene, a Thinking clip on the Timeline's Cognitive Events track does the same for exactly the stretch it covers, look-away included: see Cognitive Events. While a clip plays it has the thinking to itself, so a tag on a line underneath it adds nothing.
The tag is described under Cognitive Tags. The blink and pupil responses, and how far each goes, are on the Eyes driver: see Blinks & Lids and Pupils.
Looking Away¶
The most visible thing a thinking person does is look away. A marked moment gives a short glance that leaves a little before the moment and comes back soon after it. A marked phrase gives a look as long as the phrase, starting a little before it. Mostly the look goes up, sometimes down, and now and then to one side as well, the same side each time for a given character, like a habit. The head turns a little with the eyes, more on a bigger look. Now and then the character blinks as its eyes leave or come back, a quick blink, never a long one. The character never lets go of what it was looking at, so the eyes come back to it.
The look-away has its own settings on the Eyes driver, under Look-Aways, in its Thinking group, and its Enable switches it off for a character who should hold the listener's eye while it thinks. Your own code can ask for one as well: see Asking for a Look-Away. A Thinking clip on the Timeline places one exactly, and can set its direction, size and head itself.
Arousal¶
How worked up the character is, regardless of which way. A worked-up character blinks more often and its pupils widen, through a lag of their own so the change rises and settles the way a real pupil does.
Arousal is not authored directly. It is composed from two things the character carries:
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Agitation | Wound up the unpleasant way: anxiety, fear, anger, fatigue |
| Excitement | Wound up the pleasant way: eagerness, anticipation, delight |
By default the two add up without going past full, so a character that is both anxious and eager reads as more worked up than either alone, and one feeling at full strength still reaches full. The brain's Mental State section offers Max as the alternative, which takes whichever of the two is higher and ignores the other.
From the Emotions¶
Every emotion in the library carries its own agitation and excitement. Angry is mostly agitation, Amused is mostly excitement, Surprised is a lot of both, and Sad is deliberately neither, because grief is quiet and a grieving character should not blink like a frightened one.
So whatever the character is feeling sets its arousal without anyone saying so. That holds for every way an emotion arrives: a tag baked into a line, a timeline track, a call from your code, a demeanor playing in the background, or the residual mood a line leaves behind. A faintly felt emotion contributes less than a strong one, and two emotions carrying the same feeling combine the way they do on the face, so a character both angry and frustrated is as worked up as the stronger of the two, not both added together. A feeling that lingers from the last line and then arrives again is felt once, not twice. The Face Rig Designer's Emotion tab shows what each emotion carries and the arousal it composes to.
From the Lines¶
For the moments where the words say it and the face does not, an <Agitation> or <Excitement> tag in the transcript sets that side directly for as long as the tagged words last, and the same moments are markers on the Cognitive Events row of the composer. Inside a tagged span the tag wins over the emotions. Outside it the emotions carry on, and each handover is ramped, so a moment that ends does not drop the character's state on the frame the tag closes.
Where to See It¶
The brain's inspector carries a Mental State readout under Behavior, beside the Gaze and Conversant states, with the live value of Thinking, Agitation and Excitement and the arousal they compose to. When a character's eyes are doing something you did not expect, this is where to find out what it believes it is feeling.