The Body¶
How much of the body joins a look, and the trunk's own choices: posture, how much it addresses what it looks at, how far it leans, and what it does at close range.
How Much of the Body Joins In¶
A look is not only the eyes. How far down the body it carries is a separate choice, and it applies to either engine.
The quick way to set it is the Chain Preset in the Eyes driver's Auto-Setup, three ways of sharing a turn down the chain:
| Preset | Reads as | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Natural | The head leads, the neck shares the rest, and the trunk joins only on large turns | Humans and dialogue. The measured default |
| Head Heavy | Motion concentrated at the head, neck and trunk barely moving. A crisp head-point | Birds and creatures, alert NPCs, snappy stylised turns |
| Body Heavy | The torso joins the turn for a whole-body reorient | Large or heavy creatures, mechs, armoured or stiff characters, dramatic turns |
A preset fills the chain in once, and every bone stays editable afterwards. Underneath it, Chain Share on the head says how much of a turn the head bone carries itself, with the rest flowing down the neck, and the neck and body bones each carry their own strength and limits. Leave the Body Bone Chain empty and the body never turns at all, which is the setting to use when a character's body is animated by hand and has to stay exact.
Taking the body out is a real requirement and not a limitation. A cutscene with hand-animated motion should keep it, and letting gaze move those bones would fight the animator. How FaceCue shares the bones it does move with your animation is on Working With Your Animation.
The Trunk¶
The trunk is where the character's own choices live, and it is the part of a look most worth setting per character. Everything here is under the Eyes driver's Posture & Trunk section and runs under Biomechanical.
Posture¶
Posture sets how far the head sits off the body before the body is asked to turn, because that depends on what the character is sitting on:
- Standing: the body turns freely, so the head goes furthest on its own before help is asked for.
- Seated, Fixed Chair: the seat does not turn, so the body barely follows and the head reaches its limit sooner.
- Seated, Swivel Chair: the seat turns with the character, which is what lets a seated look go as deep as a standing one.
- Auto behaves as Standing. It is set aside for a posture your game supplies, so a character left on Auto will follow one once your game can provide it.
Each posture has its own edge, the angle the head sits off the body before the body joins, so a character can be tuned to bring its body in early or do more with the head alone.
A character does not stay in one posture, so the setting is yours to change from code, through the Eyes driver's Posture property. Set it when the character sits down or stands up, and the next look reads the new edge.
public EyesDriver.BiomechanicalPosture Posture { get; set; }
var eyes = character.GetComponent<EyesDriver>();
// the character takes a seat behind the counter
eyes.Posture = EyesDriver.BiomechanicalPosture.SeatedFixed;
// and gets up again
eyes.Posture = EyesDriver.BiomechanicalPosture.Standing;
The four values are Auto, Standing, SeatedFixed and SeatedSwivel. Simple has no posture, so under that engine the property is stored and ignored.
How Much It Addresses¶
Address Intent (%) is how much the character turns to face what it looks at, from a glance, where the eyes and head do the work and the body barely joins, to a full address, where the body turns to face the thing the way a person turns to someone speaking to them. It is a default on the character, and your game can set it per look through the notice call, where it holds until the look changes.
Two switches say when the body is allowed in at all. Trunk At Settle lets the body take up part of the lean once a look has landed and the head has settled into carrying it. Trunk At Relief lets the body lean in to cover the difference when a deep look has been held past comfort and the head gives some of it back. Either off leaves that moment to the head and eyes, and the body to your other systems.
How Far It Leans¶
Trunk Relief (%) is the depth dial: how much of its comfortable range the body spends on looks, from a character that leans as far as it comfortably can down to one that keeps its body still. The comfortable range itself is set per axis, up, down and to either side, as the range the body will hold and stay in, not its physical limit, so a held twist stays small even on an expressive character. Zero to the side is a legitimate choice for a character whose body should never twist into a look.
Amount says what the body delivers once it decides to lean: Full Lean commits the whole budgeted share, the way people settle on something they are staying with, and Only What's Needed brings the head comfortably inside its range and no further, a quieter, more economical character. Chest Horizontal and Chest Vertical split a twist between the chest and the abdomen, since a real torso twists mostly up in the ribs over a lower back that barely turns.
What the Lean Does Between Looks¶
On Target Swap: when the look moves to a new target, the body can carry the lean straight from one to the next, the way people track a conversation they are settled into, or release and reform, straightening first and forming the new lean from upright, a punctuating character.
On Give-Up: when a look is given up, the body can release with the look, hold the lean until the look genuinely ends, or linger and follow the head home a moment later, the slow reluctant organ, with Linger Duration saying how long.
Too Close¶
Something that comes inside the character's personal space, in front of the body, eases the character back at the waist with the head dipping a little, and the eyes keep tracking through it. Lean Back The Trunk, under On Target Too Close, is where that is switched on, and Personal Space is the distance, scaled by the character's height so a child and a giant read the same space in their own terms. Lean is how far the character eases back at full effect, and Chest Counter-Curve is how much the chest curls forward while the waist leans back, to keep facing the thing. It works under every engine.
Beside it, Minimum Tracking Distance (m) is how close a target may come before the eyes stop aiming straight at it, and Too Close To Track says what the head does once it does: keep the face turned toward whoever stepped in close and let only the eyes go, or let go of the whole look and come back to rest.
Protective Blink¶
Something that comes at the face fast draws a blink. People blink just before a thrown object or a jab would arrive, to protect the eyes, and the character does the same with whatever it is looking at, one blink per approach. Something that comes close slowly draws no blink: the eyes stay open to keep watching it, the way a person watches someone who has stepped too close. Blink At Fast Approach, under Protective Blink in the same section, switches it off for a character who should not flinch.