Prosody Channel¶
The brow shapes the voice moves: the lift on the words it leans on, the settle between them, and the gather on a question.
The Prosody channel is the smallest of the four. It holds three brow recipes, and every one of them is driven by the voice rather than placed by you. You author what each brow shape looks like on your rig. When it plays, and how much of it shows, the Prosody driver works out from the line as it goes, covered in Emphasis & Prosody.
The head moves with the voice too, but nothing about that is authored here. It turns bones rather than blendshapes, so it has no recipe, and it is tuned on the Prosody driver.
The Recipes¶
The library ships a fixed set.
| Recipe | What it is | When it plays |
|---|---|---|
| Brow Raise | The brows lifting | On the moments the voice leans on, and at the end of a yes or no question |
| Brow Dip | The brows settling downward | Through the flatter stretches between those moments |
| Brow Furrow | A gather between the brows | On a question built on a question word, such as who, what or where |
Every recipe opens with a description of what it is, why it matters and how to build it. You bind blendshapes into the three, and you can split a recipe into parts of your own if your rig builds a brow from several blendshapes. What you cannot do is add a fourth, since the driver only knows how to move these three.
A rig with no furrow blendshape leaves Brow Furrow empty, and that is safe. Nothing shows there, and the other two carry on unchanged.
Brow Raise¶
The brows lifting with the voice. Brows carry a large part of how engaged someone sounds, and this is the shape that carries most of it.
Author a clear lift, not a subtle one. The raise spends most of its time partway there, and it reaches the full amount only on the strongest moments. A lift that looks timid at full strength vanishes in ordinary speech.
Left & Right¶
Bind the brows as a left and right pair where your rig has them, rather than as one blendshape for both.
Most of the time the two sides move together either way. The pair matters in one case. On a yes or no question, the driver can raise mostly one brow for a quizzical read. That option, Asymmetric, is off by default. It needs a left and a right to work with, and a raise bound as a single blendshape simply lifts both brows evenly instead.
Brow Dip¶
The brows settling down through the flatter stretches. It works by contrast: the dip is the low point the raises lift from, so how much a raise reads depends as much on this shape as on the raise itself.
Keep it small. It does its job by being the low point, not by being seen. A dip you can clearly pick out on its own reads as a frown the character did not mean.
Brow Furrow¶
A gather between the brows that follows the question words in a line rather than its emphasis. A question and a statement of the same length and energy look alike without it.
It only appears on a baked line, where the words give the question away. It is on by default, and light, a touch of puzzlement rather than a frown: it reaches about a third of the shape you author. Both are set on the Prosody driver under Question, in Wh-Question Brow Furrow.
Author it at full strength like the others. The driver decides how little of it to use.
Sharing the Brows¶
The same brow blendshapes are wanted by more than one part of FaceCue. An emotion's expressions move the brows, the Eyes channel lifts them on an upward look, and this channel moves them with the voice.
You can bind the same blendshapes in all three. Prosody adds its motion on top of whatever else is on those blendshapes, so a character who is already surprised still gets the lift on a stressed word, over the surprise rather than in place of it.
That is why each recipe here is authored on a neutral face, as the movement alone. Build the lift a stressed word adds, not a surprised brow. The emotion supplies the rest.
What Is Not Here¶
When it plays, and by how much. The voice decides that, continuously. You cannot place a brow raise on a particular word. What you tune is how strongly the character responds, on the Prosody driver. See Tuning It for baked and live lines.
The head. It moves with the flow of the speech as well, marking the words that carry weight, riding through the pauses and hinting when a thought comes to an end, all set on the Prosody driver.
Emotion. A frown that means displeasure belongs to an emotion, not to this channel. See Emotion Channel.