Breath¶
An autonomous breath cycle, shaped by speech and by exertion.
Breath is the quietest thing FaceCue does and one of the most effective. A character who is not breathing reads as a prop, and almost nobody watching can say why.
The Cycle¶
A resting rhythm that runs on its own, all the time, whether or not anything else is happening.
That is the important part of how it is built. Breath is not a response to speech that decays back to nothing when the line ends. It is always running, and speech modulates it. So a character standing silently is still breathing, and the transition into and out of a line is a change in an existing rhythm, not something starting and stopping.
While Speaking¶
Speech rides on the exhale. You cannot talk while breathing in, and the face shows it.
The breath holds low through a line, because the speaker is spending an exhale on it instead of cycling normally. A pause draws a refill, the breath a speaker takes when they have run out and have more to say.
That pattern is most of why breath is worth having on a talking character. A line delivered by someone who never seems to run out of air reads as synthetic, and the refill in the gap is the thing that fixes it.
Exertion¶
Effort deepens and quickens the cycle, and the character settles afterwards instead of snapping back.
The settling is the part worth tuning. Someone who has just stopped running does not return to a resting rhythm immediately, and the recovery is more visible than the exertion itself.
What It Moves¶
Whatever the character's breath recipe binds, which is a rig question and not a driver one.
On most characters that is the chest and shoulders, sometimes with a little in the nostrils and the jaw. How far down the body it reaches depends on how much of the body your rig gives FaceCue to work with, and on how much of it you want moving.
Breath is deliberately easy to scope down. On a character seen from the shoulders up, chest movement is all that is needed and everything below it is wasted.
Tuning It¶
Three things, in the order they are worth touching.
Depth. How much movement a breath produces. The most common mistake is too much: real breathing at rest is barely visible, and a chest that heaves reads as distress.
Rate. How fast the resting cycle runs. Slower reads as calm, faster as agitated, and it is an effective character trait on its own.
How strongly speech holds it down. How much the cycle flattens through a line. Higher makes the refill in the gaps more pronounced, which suits a character who is out of breath or speaking urgently.