The FaceCue Tracks

The tracks for what audio does not carry.

Four tracks, all under FaceCue in the track menu, and all bound to the character's FaceCue Brain. None of them needs a Director Watcher. Bind a track to the character's brain and it plays. Each one drives a channel the way a script would, and each follows that channel's own rules for what happens when two things want it at once.

Each clip names what it plays on the track itself: its cue file or registry clip, its emotion and intensity, its look target, or whether it looks away. A phoneme clip that has not been given one yet reads (None), and an emotion clip reads (No emotion) or (No cue file), so an empty clip is easy to spot.

Half a minute of the headline video's own timeline: the dialogue on an audio track the Director Watcher reads, a gaze clip on the camera, two Thinking clips where the character stops to think, and emotion clips, each named with its intensity and drawing its own rise and fall. Click the image for it at full size.

Phoneme Cues

The mouth from baked cues, with no audio involved. This track is kept for the case where there is no audio to follow and none is wanted: a silent character in an interactive novel, a line mouthed under music, a face in a scene with no voice track at all. For a line that has audio, put the audio on an audio track and let the watcher drive the face. Lip Sync Without Audio covers the whole subject.

A clip is a span of cues the character mouths while the playhead is inside it, and it takes its cues from one of two places: a Cue File, the .json the baker wrote for the line, or a Registry Clip Id, a clip name resolved through the character's normal cue registry chain. The inspector's Validate Cue Source checks whichever is in use.

Clip In and Speed are honoured, so a clip can be trimmed or retimed and the cues follow.

Blending and easing work the way they do for audio clips under the watcher. The mouth follows one clip at a time, and a clip's blend weight decides only which one: where two clips crossfade the handover lands where the curves cross, and the new clip starts from the shape the old one left. An ease-in or ease-out on a clip does not fade the mouth, because there is no such thing as a half-strength phoneme. It only moves the point at which the clip wins or loses against a neighbour. Against anything else that wants the mouth, a voice line through the audio path or a script's own call, the most recently started utterance wins and hands back when it ends.

Emotion

An emotion the character plays while the playhead is inside the clip. Plays chooses between two things. Emotion plays one emotion across the clip at the set Intensity, rising and falling over the clip's own ease lengths. Cue File plays a baked emotion cue file at the clip's local time, Clip In and Speed honoured.

Emotion Blend and Repeat Blend let one clip choose how its emotion meets others, in place of the character's own settings. On a Cue File clip, Repeat Blend also decides how the recording's own cues combine where it holds the same emotion twice. Leave them on the character's setting unless this one moment wants a different feel.

Emotions add up. Clips on this track layer with each other, with a playing line's own emotion, and with anything your code plays, rather than replacing them.

Leaving a Mood

Turn on Leave Residual Mood and the clip leaves a faint trace of its emotion on the face once it ends, the residual mood a spoken line leaves behind. It arrives as the clip's emotion falls away, so the face goes straight from the clip to the mood. A clip the playhead leaves early, or whose Timeline stops partway through it, follows the character's setting for an interrupted Timeline clip, and a clip that runs into the next one leaves nothing, since the next clip has the face by then.

Any emotion clip starting clears a mood still standing, whether a line or another clip left it, the way a new line does.

Rise and Fall

A clip's rise and fall are its ease handles. Their lengths are how long the emotion takes to come up and how long it takes to go away, so it arrives on a clip the way it does on a spoken line, each part of the expression in its authored order and on its own curve. Only the length counts. A curve shaped by hand on a handle is not read, because the emotion already carries a curve for each of its expressions.

A new clip starts from its emotion's own timing, and the clip's inspector shows what the emotion asks for beside what the clip holds. Set one by hand and it stays where you put it, through later changes of emotion. Restore Defaults takes the emotion's timing again, and Refresh From Emotions on the track menu does it for a whole track.

Overlapping Clips

Overlapping clips are both on. Two clips over the same stretch are both on the face at once, combined rather than traded one for the other. A handover from one emotion to a different one carries across instead of dipping through the middle. Two clips of the same emotion combine as one, and where they crossfade the face dips through the middle, the way two audio clips crossfading do, unless the clip's Repeat Blend asks for something else. See Overlapping Emotions.

Timeline's crossfade does not fade the emotions. Drag one emotion clip over another and Timeline draws its usual crossfade across the overlap, but neither emotion follows it. Each clip keeps the rise and fall it drew on its own, and the two are combined on the face.

Before: Proud and Focused side by side, each drawing its own rise and fall.

After: the clips overlap and Timeline draws its crossfade, but each emotion keeps the shape it had. Click either image for it at full size.

When a clip reaches its end, whatever it still holds finishes its own fall rather than cutting. If the playhead jumps out of a clip partway through, or the Timeline is stopped there, the emotion clears at once, and the Emotion driver's Interruption settings can have it ramp down or play out instead. A Timeline counts as stopped whether it is stopped from code, switched off with its GameObject, destroyed, given another Timeline, or simply ends before the clip does. Rebuilding the Timeline from code while keeping the playhead where it was does not count, and the emotion carries on. Scrub back into a clip while its emotion is still leaving and the same emotion returns, rather than a second one starting beside it.

What a Clip Draws

Each clip draws what it plays. An Emotion clip draws the emotion's shape across the clip. A Cue File clip draws the recording: every emotion in the file as its own outline in that emotion's colour, named where the name fits, with the clip's fade drawn over it. Hover the clip for the full list of its emotions and their times. A file that cannot be read, or that names no emotion the character knows, carries Timeline's warning instead.

Right-click a clip or its track and open FaceCue › Clip Shape to switch Emotions Timing and Expressions on and off. The same two switches sit on the FaceCue Clips panel in the Scene view, which appears while an emotion clip is selected.

Gaze

Where the character looks while the playhead is inside the clip, as a Look Target in the scene. Drop anything from the scene anywhere on the clip's inspector, or pick it in the field. The target is remembered by the scene's Playable Director rather than by the Timeline, so the same Timeline played from two directors can aim each character at something different.

The gaze track only blends. A look has no inner timeline to trim or retime, so Clip In and Speed mean nothing here.

Blending and easing decide only which clip has the look. The character looks at one thing at a time, so where two clips crossfade the handover lands where the curves cross and the eyes travel to the new target the way they travel to any new target. An ease-in or ease-out does not make a look weaker or partial. It moves the moment the clip wins or loses. Two things are worth authoring on purpose:

• A clip with no target reads as looking at nothing. It drops the look for as long as that clip is winning, and it is the way to author a deliberate look away inside a run of looks while keeping the ability to crossfade into it.
• A gap between clips releases the track's claim, and the character stops looking and eases off exactly as it would had your game cleared the target, lingering a moment and coming back the way it always does.

A Gaze clip is an override on the look target, so it takes the look over from the character's look source for as long as it plays. The latest override always wins, and nothing is stacked:

• A clip that starts replaces any look your game had set. When the clip ends, the character goes back to its look source, not to the look your game set before.
• A look your game sets during a clip replaces the clip's. The track takes the look back at its next clip.
• A clip ending only lets go of its own look. If your game took the look over in the meantime, it keeps it.

The track also never drops a look instantly. A cut that has to drop the look with no easing at all wants the Eyes driver's immediate release, fired from a Timeline signal, which hands the head and eyes straight back on purpose.

Cognitive Events

What the character is thinking, placed exactly. The track holds one kind of clip today, Thinking. For as long as the playhead is inside a Thinking clip the character thinks, the way a <Thinking> tag makes it think on a spoken line, and it looks away: the eyes leave as the clip starts and come back as it ends. Mental State covers what thinking does to a face.

Look Away off keeps the thinking and leaves the eyes where they are. Such a clip reads Thinking (Eyes Stay) on the track.

Shaping the Look

The clip's inspector sets the look a section at a time, and each section either takes the character's own Thinking look-away settings or sets its own. Switch a section's Taken From to This Clip to set it.

Section	What it sets
Direction	Up or down, and whether the look also goes to one side, and which.
Size	How far up or down the eyes go, and how far to the side. A sideways size set here sends every look to a side.
Head	How much the head turns along with the eyes, and how far the eyes go before the head takes the rest.

A section left on Character's Setting picks its values the way a marked moment in a line does. The same Timeline picks the same look every time it plays, however the playhead arrives in the clip, and a clip moved along the track picks a new one.

How a Thinking Clip Plays

• It plays in play mode. Pausing the Timeline holds the look where it is, and the eyes come back when the playhead leaves the clip, at any Timeline speed. Rebuilding the Timeline from code while keeping the playhead where it was does not interrupt it.
• A clip has the thinking to itself. A Thinking tag on a line playing under the clip adds no second look-away and does not look away once the clip ends.
• Clips do not blend or ease. Where two overlap, the later one takes over the look, and the first one ending does not bring the eyes back early.
• A new look target ends the look-away early, as it does any other, so a Gaze clip that starts inside a Thinking clip ends its look. Start the Gaze clip before the Thinking clip, or after it.
• The character's Thinking look-aways have to be on, under Look-Aways on the Eyes driver. Switched off, the clip brings the thinking without the look-away.