Frequently Asked Questions¶
Short answers to the questions that come up before and just after buying, each pointing at the page that covers it properly.
What FaceCue Is¶
What does FaceCue actually do?¶
It drives the whole face from your dialogue: the mouth, the eyes, the emotion, the head and the breath. Every part is optional, so you can take the lip sync on its own or the whole performance. See the introduction.
Does it make animation clips?¶
No. A bake produces cues, instructions about what is being said and how, and the face follows them live every frame. That is why the same line plays differently, and correctly, on two different characters. See Cues, Not Keyframes.
Do I have to bake every line?¶
No. Baking gives the most exact result and is the one to build around, but a line that cannot be baked, a microphone or a line generated while the game runs, is driven live instead. And a clip that was never baked still moves the mouth, a tier down, rather than leaving it still. See Speech and The Fallback Chain.
Characters¶
Will it work with my character?¶
If its face moves through blendshapes, yes. FaceCue moves the mouth, the emotions and the brows with blendshapes, and uses bones for the eyes, the head, the neck and the breath. The OneClick wizard recognises the common character tools and sets a character up in one pass, and a rig it does not recognise can still be set up by hand. See The Families.
What about a character whose jaw is a bone?¶
A mouth that only opens through a jaw bone has no lip sync today, unless its export can bake the jaw into a blendshape, which many can. Bone-driven lip sync is on the roadmap. See What a Rig Needs.
Does it work with MetaHuman?¶
Yes, with two MetaHuman families in the wizard, one for the standard ARKit set and one for the full control set, which drives finer speech. What a MetaHuman needs first is its expressions exported as blendshapes on the face mesh, and Unreal has no export that does that for Unity. Our FBX Exporter for MetaHumans does it, or you can bring one across with an export solution of your own. See MetaHuman.
If you own FaceCue, the exporter is free while it is in beta: mail your Unity Asset Store invoice number to support@facecue.net and we will send you a code. What comes with FaceCue once the exporter reaches 1.0.0 may change, and its licence says what the code covers.
Languages & Audio¶
Which languages does it support?¶
Every language gets lip sync. 10 are custom tuned, each with its own recognizer: English, Greek, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Korean and Portuguese (Brazil). Over 50 more are covered by a multilingual decoder, and a universal path reads any language from the audio alone. See Language Support, which has a checker for your language.
Do I need a transcript?¶
No, but a transcript makes a bake more accurate, and FaceCue can write one for you from the recording. See With & Without a Transcript.
Does it need an internet connection or a cloud service?¶
No cloud service. English ships with the package. The models for other languages, text to speech, the voice changer and speech recognition install with one click inside the editor, and run locally on your machine once they are there. See Requirements & Compatibility.
Can it make the dialogue too?¶
Yes, as an option. The Speech Production Tools write a transcript from a recording, a recording from text, a voice from a few reference clips, and move an actor's read onto that voice, all locally, in one window. See Speech Production Tools.
Does it work with a microphone or voice chat?¶
Yes, through the live modes, which read audio as it arrives. A browser build has no microphone of its own, so it needs a microphone solution you bring. See What Runs Where.
Your Project¶
Will it fight my own animations?¶
No. Authored animation and the facial performance combine. A head you animate yourself, or eyes an animation moves, are handed over rather than overwritten. See Working With Your Animation.
Can my own scripts read the face, or change it?¶
Yes. Read the finished face from the Resolver's event rather than from your own late update, hand FaceCue the rotation of a bone it also moves instead of setting it yourself, and share a blendshape with your own lip sync or expression code through a Sampled channel. Each has its own section in Script Coexistence, with what happens at each point in the frame.
Can I sequence a scene in Timeline?¶
Yes. FaceCue adds phoneme, emotion and gaze tracks, and a watcher that finds the characters on your audio tracks for you. See Timeline.
Does it work with my dialogue system?¶
The lines themselves need nothing from it: FaceCue follows whatever audio a character plays. What a dialogue system can add is conversation state, so a character looks and listens like someone being spoken to. Any dialogue system can feed that, and Pixel Crushers' Dialogue System has an experimental adapter. See Dialogue State and Integrations.
Does it add packages to my project?¶
No. Timeline and Addressables are used if you already have them and ignored if you do not. Meta's OVRLipSync, which powers Live Viseme and the baker's Universal recognizer, ships inside FaceCue. See Integrations.
Can I use FaceCue to train an AI model?¶
No. The Asset Store terms require express consent to train a model on an asset, and Firecrest does not give it, for FaceCue itself or for the cue files, curves and captures it produces. See Licensing.
Platforms & Performance¶
Which Unity versions?¶
Unity 2021.3 through Unity 6.6. See Unity Versions.
Which platforms?¶
A baked line plays on every platform Unity builds for, WebGL included. The live modes have limits on Linux and in the browser, set out in What Runs Where.
Does it work in VR and on Quest?¶
Yes. On a headset we recommend writing the face on the display's own frames rather than at a fixed rate. See Display Mode.
Which render pipelines?¶
All three, Built-in, URP and HDRP, and both scripting backends. FaceCue drives blendshapes and bones, which no pipeline changes. See Render Pipelines & Scripting Backends.
Can I bake on a Mac or on Linux?¶
Not today. Baking runs in the editor on Windows, and what it bakes plays everywhere. Other desktop platforms are on the roadmap. See Baking Is Editor Only, on Windows.
Do I need a powerful graphics card to bake?¶
No. Baking works on the CPU on every machine. Both GPU backends ship with the package for faster bakes, with nothing extra to install. See Backends.
How many characters can talk at once?¶
As many as you want. FaceCue sets no limit, and each character after the first costs less than the first did: in our tests each extra one cost about half as much, so eight cost about five times one, on a PC and on a Quest alike. What sets a character's cost is mostly its rig, and emotion is the part to ration in a crowd. See Every Character After the First Costs Less.
After You Buy¶
Where do I start?¶
Getting Started, in order. It takes a project from empty to a character speaking a baked line.
Something is not working. Where do I look?¶
Troubleshooting goes from symptom to cause to fix. For a line that plays with a still mouth, start with the Console, which says what happened.
How do I reach a person?¶
Through Support. Questions reach the person who built the part you are asking about.