Emotion¶
Expressions on top of the talking. Twenty-eight named emotions, two ways to build one, and six ways to bring one onto a character's face.
Emotion in FaceCue is always authored. It comes from something you wrote, tagged, placed or triggered. Nothing here guesses how a character feels from the sound of their voice.
Layered and Solid¶
Two ways an emotion reaches the rig, set on the character.
Layered builds each emotion from expression recipes, each with its own weight and its own timing inside the emotion. This is the usual choice, and it is why an emotion arrives as a face doing several things slightly out of step and not as one pose fading up.
Solid drives the rig's own emotion shapes directly, one recipe per emotion. If your character already ships with a good Angry shape, this uses it. It is simpler to reason about and easier to shape by hand, at the cost of the internal detail Layered gives you.
Neither is better. Layered suits a rig with a rich set of small expressions, Solid suits one built around whole emotions.
Six Ways In¶
The same emotion, arriving by whichever route suits where you are working.
| Route | When it suits |
|---|---|
| Baked onto a clip | Written as a tag in the transcript and placed by the baker |
| Tagged in the transcript | The same thing, from the writing side. See Transcript Tags |
| The Cue Clip Composer | Placed and shaped by hand against the waveform |
| A Timeline track | For a scene you are already cutting in Timeline |
| Your own code | For anything driven by what is happening in the game |
| A mood | Sitting underneath everything, with no particular moment attached |
They are not alternatives so much as the same feature reached from wherever you happen to be. A line tagged in the script can be reshaped in the composer afterwards, because the tag produced an ordinary editable cue.
Ramps¶
An emotion is not a switch. Each one is an envelope: where it starts, how quickly it comes up, how long it holds, how quickly it goes, and where it ends.
Those five points are what you shape, whether by dragging handles on the composer's emotion row or by typing exact times into its editor. Left alone they take a sensible shape on their own, so an emotion you have not thought about still arrives and leaves like an emotion, not like a light switch.
Where the ramps sit relative to the words you tagged matters. An emotion that arrives exactly on its first word reads as late, because a real face is already changing before the sentence starts.
Emotion and Speech Share the Mouth¶
The face is allocated in three bands, and this is what stops expression and speech fighting.
Emotion owns the upper face outright. Nothing about talking has a claim on the brows.
The mid face is shared. The cheek half of a smile lives here and stays put whatever the mouth is doing.
The mouth is mostly speech's. Emotion takes only a small part of it, so words stay readable.
When a closure has to land, the p in a word that must actually close, emotion gives the mouth up entirely for that moment. But the closure only ever takes its own share, so the expression bends around it and comes back instead of snapping off. A smiling character saying a b still looks like they are smiling.
This Is Why a Smile Survives a Sentence
The naive version of this is a priority list, where speech wins the mouth and the smile disappears every time a word closes. The face flickers, and it is one of the most common tells in facial animation.
Allocating by region and by share instead means the parts that can coexist do, and only the part that genuinely conflicts yields.
Idle Demeanor and Residual Mood¶
Two ways a character carries a colouring while nothing in particular is happening.
Demeanor is who the character is: a palette they sit in by default, so a nervous character reads as nervous before they say anything.
Residual mood is what just happened. An emotion does not vanish the moment its cue ends, it leaves something behind that decays. A character who was angry a moment ago is not instantly neutral.
Both sit underneath the authored emotions instead of competing with them.
Overlapping Emotions¶
Two emotions at once resolve instead of fighting. Their envelopes are combined, and the result is the same on every run.
That determinism matters more than it sounds. It means a line that looked right in the editor looks the same in the build, and the same on every playthrough. Nothing here is random.
The Emotion Library¶
The named emotions live in a library on the character, and that library is what an emotion name is looked up in.
The vocabulary is fixed and the look is not. FaceCue ships twenty-eight named emotions, each already tuned, and what any of them looks like on your character is yours to change. Your Angry can be a different Angry from anyone else's.
What you cannot do yet is rename one or add a twenty-ninth. A name the library does not carry produces nothing on the face, and the baker will not warn you at bake time, because the tag was valid, so it is worth checking the library for the names it has before tagging a script against them.