Emotion Mixer Window

The Emotion Mixer is a powerful feature for creating facial animation that is more specific to an individual piece of dialogue than a small list of emotions can normally provide. It lets you mix two or more emotions together by a customisable amount.

To start, create a new Emotion Marker on your timeline by right-clicking somewhere on the waveform, then instead of choosing an emotion from the list, click the Add New Mixer option.

This will create a new marker that behaves just like any other. The new marker will appear completely black at first, as it contains no emotions to mix together.

To fix this, right-click the marker and choose Edit Mixer. This will open the Emotion Mixer Window. The main feature of this window is the Emotions List in the centre. You can add an emotion to this list by clicking the + button at the bottom of it, and selecting an emotion from the drop-down. You can add as many emotions as you like, but each emotion can only feature once in a single mixer.

The Emotion Mixer with two of the default emotions added, Happy and Eyebrows Up.

You can change the influence of each emotion by moving your mouse over the right-hand side of a bar and dragging it left or right. When LipSync plays a clip with an Emotion Mixer in it, the final pose for the emotion will be created by blending all the values from its constituent emotions together.

In Normal Mixing Mode, the values of all emotions will add up to 1 - this is to prevent the situation where a a single bone or blendable that is shared by multiple emotions in a single mixer is pushed beyond its normal range of motion. The downside of this is that mixers with three or more emotions can often end up looking "muddy" or unclear, with the individual emotions lost in the mix. To get around this you can instead enable Additive Mixing Mode from the Mixing Mode drop-down at the top of the window.

In Additive Mixing Mode, the values of each emotion is simply constrained between 0 and 1, leaving you free to mix them however you like. This can however cause the final pose to become very exaggerated, or even physically impossible so use it with caution!

Be aware that switching from Additive to Normal mode will clear the emotion influence values you have set, and all emotions will have an even influence until you change them.