Art & Soundtracks #10: Facial expressions

Hello there,

This month we’re diving into something more technical as we show you how our new character facial expressions work. They are made with things called blend shapes, which allow us to manipulate the shapes of various parts of a 3D character. In simple terms, think of it as a slider: at zero, the face remains in its neutral state, and at one, the expression reaches its full intensity. This system gives us precise control over the character’s emotions, which adds so much more detail to dialogue.

Stay tuned for more!

- Taival Crew

List of some of the facial expressions

Artists notes (Mouth-twisting stuff)

We wanted to make our characters more lively because in current state their faces are static and expressionless. That's why we decided to implement facial expressions for our characters. As you can see in the image below, there are separate blend shapes for eye and mouth movements. By combining these we can create various types of facial expressions, and it's really fun to play with them! The system is almost finished, and we hope it'll be ready for the upcoming playtest.

- Juho, artist and visual wizard

Cheerful (or cursed) goblin