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Emotional faces

 

For a while, I've been trying to decide whether to go ahead and add facial expressions to the characters in the current project. 

It's not something I've done in the past, because it's a lot of extra work. And I have to wonder if the result is worth the effort. I'm not a great animator, and you need a *lot* of extra geometry, bones  and rigging to make a face show emotions naturally.


I think the result of this experiment is that I'm going to leave facial expressions out of this project. It's easy enough to edit the static character portraits to produce a couple of different "feelings" to show how characters are responding to dialog.


I may use the more detailed rig for a mini-game in the story though. The player should try to guess the character's emotions while they deliver a message, and guess if they are telling the whole truth by how well their visible emotions match the content of the text.


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