Emotion¶
Emotions on top of the talking. 28 named emotions, two ways to build one, and four ways to bring one onto a character's face.
Emotion in FaceCue is always authored. It comes from something you wrote, tagged, placed or set off from your own code. Nothing here guesses how a character feels from the sound of their voice.
Layered & Solid¶
Two ways an emotion reaches the rig, set on the character. Layered builds each emotion from expressions, each with its own weight and its own timing, so an emotion arrives as a face doing several things slightly out of step. Solid drives the rig's own emotion blendshapes, one recipe per emotion, for a character that already ships good ones. See Layered & Solid for both, and for which to use.
Emotion in Four Ways¶
However an emotion arrives, it plays by the same rules. It can be baked onto a clip, from a transcript tag or placed by hand in the Cue Clip Composer, put on a Timeline track, played from your own code, or carried as a demeanor while the character waits. See Emotion in Four Ways.
Timing & Blending¶
Every emotion rises and falls on a timing of its own. Where two emotions meet, or an emotion meets the words, they share the face rather than fight over it. See Timing & Blending.
Residual Mood & Demeanors¶
Underneath the authored emotions, a character carries a residual mood from the line it just spoke and a demeanor while it waits, so a face with nothing to say is never simply blank. See Residual Mood & Demeanors.
What It Costs¶
Emotion is the one part of the face whose cost is not bounded by the scene, and it is worth knowing why before a crowd surprises you.
Speech is naturally limited. A character speaks one line at a time, the line ends, and on most screens one character is speaking at once. Emotion has none of those limits. A layered emotion moves the most blendshapes of anything on the face, several expressions each with their own blendshapes. Two emotions can play at once and both are resolved. A residual mood keeps playing after the cue that caused it has ended. A demeanor keeps playing while the character is idle or listening, with nothing else happening at all. So a crowd of characters with demeanors on, each drifting through a palette while nobody speaks, is moving more blendshapes per frame than the same crowd all talking.
Where the Budget Goes on a Busy Scene
If your budget is tight, treat emotion as the thing to ration. Give it to the characters that carry the scene and keep it off the crowd, or keep the crowd on Solid, which plays one recipe per emotion instead of a stack of expressions. Leave demeanors to the characters someone is looking at. And switch on Distance Rate Limiting on the brain, which cuts a distant character's rate, beside Visibility Freeze, already on, which stops an unseen one outright, so the cost follows the camera without anyone having to manage it.
What moves the cost is blendshapes per write, and the rate they are written at is a dial. Both are set out under Output Rate, the two policies under Making It Cheaper, and all of it in Performance.
The Emotion Library¶
The named emotions are built into FaceCue, one fixed library that every character reads, and it is what an emotion name is looked up in.
A name the library does not carry produces nothing on the face, and the baker will not warn you at bake time, because the tag was valid. So it is worth checking the names before tagging a script against them, in the list the Face Rig Designer's Emotion channel shows.
The Vocabulary Is Fixed, How It Looks on Your Character Is Not
FaceCue ships 28 named emotions, each already tuned. That set is the vocabulary to write against today.
What you can change is how any of them looks on your character. An emotion is built from expressions with their own weights and timing. How each of those expressions looks on your character is yours to tune in the Face Rig Designer. Your Angry can be a different Angry from anyone else's.
What you cannot change yet is the set itself. Renaming one, adding a 29th of your own, or changing which expressions an emotion is composed of and how, is not something the tool offers. Opening that up is on the roadmap.
One name in the library is there for a different reason. Neutral puts nothing on the face, and its job is to clear the mood a line leaves behind: see Clearing It with Neutral.