Originally by: Lachesis VII

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For everyone having trouble with the "facial expressions" issue!

The key here is to remember that the sculpting phase is NOT when you give your portrait a facial expression. All you're doing there is creating the actual structure of the face. Get that the way you want it, then head over into the portrait mode.

Portrait mode is where you edit facial expressions. Here's a quick cheat sheet as to what does what:

Aiming:
Crown of head: head tilt side to side
Ears/tip of nose/cheekbones: point head
Eyes: Aim gaze (click on the avatar's LEFT eye, the controls for the right eye are backwards)

Emotion:
Upper lip: Slide left or right, and pull a bit to change face between smile, frown, pout, scowl, and so on, though remember that the rest of the expression needs to be supported by other facial muscles or it won't convey properlty.

Chin: Opens and closes mouth. Can also **** jaw to one side or the other, and a bit of forward and back.

Plane of face (trianglular areas beside the bridge of nose): Puckering of nose, to some extent, but mostly control over the lower eyelids.

Nostrils: Controls flare of nose, but only slightly.

Upper eyelids: openness of eyes

Brow: the "worry line" between the eyes. Can range from open to scowling. This is the hardest slider to work with, it seems that the positioning parameters a bit finicky, once messed with its hard to get back into a neutral position.

Now, note that using the "ui_charpose" wheel does nothing to the way the head is aiming or the way the face looks. Also note that going back into sculpt mode will reset the facial expression *in sculpt mode* to a neutral expression, but it will stay the same in portrait mode.

After I figured out how to use the posing tools, I took my only Achura character and played photo-shoot with her. I think this gives an idea of the range of emotion that can be conveyed, but its soooooooooo much more convincing when it's animating. This is the first time I've ever seen digital avatars whose emotional states I could read as easily as real persons, without said emotion being exaggerated (like in The Sims).

http://photos.napalm.net/clubsi/eveportfolio.jpg

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