Ms Littlefish's Faceset Edits and Faceset Tutorials

[Ms Littlefish]

Hello, all. Now that the holiday event is over on the forum I'm going to be coming back to this tutorial and getting into showing you how to make an emotion set with this technique. But for the sake of time I would like to show only a few on camera. So I would like to ask you, "What emotions would you be most interested in seeing me make on camera?"

I can definitely make a more complete sheet off camera, mind you.

 

[cabfe]

I'd say the three basic ones (if it's not too much)

Neutral - happy - sad.

From them, it should be easy to draw the others as needed.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Thanks, cabfe. The face I've done in parts 1 and 2 count as neutral expression but I think it's a good idea to show the basic ones. I may trade out neutral for angry; I think that one is important to get right as well. Or, Heck, I may just do a few videos to show how I would do my whole sheet. XD

 

[Evan Finkel]

Great tutorial Littlefish! I must play around with this a bit~

 

[Cozzer]

Wow, I tried playing with generator parts in paint.net, but I never actually bothered with resizing, recoloring and such since I thought it wouldn't have been worth it. Now I'm interested in it again.

For the emotion set thing, I'd actually suggest doing some unusual expressions... something that requires more than swapping mouths and eyebrows. Anyway, good work!

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Thank you so much, Cozzer. I'm hoping to get the next video up soon and I'm very happy you've fond this thread interesting.

I also really like your suggestion. There are a number of my complicated and unique faces I have made in the past and I want to make sure I can illustrate that you make very expressive characters and have their personalities be a little more, well, personal! 

 

[Evan Finkel]

Here's what I get so far, it was so interesting.

 

[Oddball]

what about netrual expressions? I have one netrual expression i made for a charecter, and need more, because it doesn't fit all situations

 

[mlogan]

More than one "neutral" expression doesn't make a lot of since to be honest. If you need a different expression, then it's because your character is expressing a different emotion. Therefore it's not neutral. Yes?

 

[Oddball]

More than one "neutral" expression doesn't make a lot of since to be honest. If you need a different expression, then it's because your character is expressing a different emotion. Therefore it's not neutral. Yes?

Iv'e observed that people have many different neutral expressions. There is so much subtltey in the human face that there is never just one version of any expression on anyone's face

 

[Goldstorm]

Iv'e observed that people have many different neutral expressions. There is so much subtltey in the human face that there is never just one version of any expression on anyone's face

Yeah but then you'll need to make hundreds of face sets! Now if you want to do that, I'm not gonna stop you. However, it's much easier to have one neutral face set, and 4 or 5 other emotional face sets to get the characters emotions/point across to the player and setup for the story. You can easily do it with 5, you don't need hundreds. 

 

[cabfe]

Yeah but then you'll need to make hundreds of face sets! Now if you want to do that, I'm not gonna stop you. However, it's much easier to have one neutral face set, and 4 or 5 other emotional face sets to get the characters emotions/point across to the player and setup for the story. You can easily do it with 5, you don't need hundreds. 

That's exactly what happened to me. I have hundreds of facesets just because I wanted to show the *right* expression.

Of course, my game is more a visual novel than a RPG, but it's still a lot more work to handle.

I'm not sure if I'll do it again.

 

[mlogan]

See I still disagree though. There might be subtle changes but they are always prompted by some shift in mood or thought. So, imo, it is no longer a "neutral" expression. But, if you want to make 50 different neutral expressions, go for it. I'd rather see Meg demonstrate how to make more drastic changes.

 

[Oddball]

i was thinking more like 2 or 3

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Ok, for starters, I will probably be making the next video this Tuesday. I think I have a good sense of what I want to do. Thanks everyone.

And now. I agree with what others have said. While I plan to make a few more videos, it would be a better use of time to share some more drastic changes. I will show a few examples of emosets but the more useful information I'm going to share is how to understand how a face moves to create an emotion. That way, instead of just copying what I do, others will be able to reflect a character's personality and use their own creativity. In fact, a lot can be learned by looking at your own face in a mirror.

Every range of human emotion could have any number of subtle variations, and I would even still find it more useful to have more than one angry than more than one neutral face. In all honesty, when I write dialogue I actually rarely find myself using the neutral expression at all, let one more than one.

One thing I will mention, though. Is that not everyone's neutral expression has to be the same. Not every character looks the same way when they express a certain emotion whether that be happy, sad, angry; you name it. I will be able to show a few examples of how I would make a face but I cannot determine exactly what your character would like like when making a certain face.That's very dependent on the character's personality. Someone who has a more serious demeanor will have a different resting face than a character who is more playful and relaxed. Or at least, it should be different.

Here is a very old (like first day I bought the software) image of some neutral faces I made of a set of my characters. If it wouldn't take me so much time I'd remake them all right now. But, what you can see is that each character has a different resting face because they have a different personality. 

 

[Scythuz]

Awesome tutorial meg, looking forward to seeing more!

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Alright, then. Shall I? Let me start off by saying this is not part 3 of the tutorial. My week had a radical change of plans. So, oh. You know how it goes! *boo, hiss*

But I didn’t want to leave town without providing at least something helpful, as I had originally planned to have a filmed tutorial. That said, there will definitely be a step-by-step filmed tutorial when I get back and it will touch on much of what I mention right now. I wanted to give some tips and some thoughts to get the juices flowing, because making your emotion set will be a creative process so it’s difficult to be technical about it all the time.

But think of this as part 2.5 to get yourself prepared! 

Ok, here is what I prepared to hold everyone over until I get back. I will film and walk you through a couple of these emotions when I get back to town.

Tips

• In my next video I will begin to reference and start using the generator add on made by RainbowGrenade. I recommend downloading these and adding them to your folder. Make sure to credit her, of course. They can be found in the VXAce resource showcase.
•  Look into the mirror and put your hands on your face. Feel and observe how the various muscles of your face move around, notably your brow ridge.
•  Every muscle in your face moves when emoting, but when moving generator parts three main things will be changed. The mouth, the eyebrows, and to a lesser but proportional degree, the eyes.
• Notice how the eyebrows on the surprised and embarrassed faces are raised and flattened. The eyes will also raise up with them.  This would apply to confused and shocked expressions. The eyebrows on the annoyed and angry faces have lowered and sharply angle. The eyes will as well. You can see the pattern I am hoping to draw here. The eyes follow the eyebrows. Most of this is subtle but makes all the difference.
• Pay no attention to whether a generator part is in the male or female folder. Many male mouths were used in the making of the image. This applies to all parts; however. Gender does not matter. Useful stock images are useful no matter what they’re arbitrarily called.
• Many of the mouths found in the default and the add-on are in my opinion, laughably oversized. Use the scale option in transform like it’s going out of style.  Likewise, if any part feels too big to you. Easy fix.
• Before making emotion sets, it will be a good idea to merge any shadow or makeup layers done around the eyes together. You’ll want to move the entire eye and the shadows need to move with them.
• Make sure to leave your neutral face file its own file. Do not accidentally save over it. You’ll want to save each emotion as its own image and you’ll need to start from the neutral face many times.

That’s it for now. Sorry for the delay on the video, but hopefully this gets you thinking about a  few things!

 

[Simon D. Aelsi]

In the very first video it shows you where to find these for STEAM users.   If I might be so bold as to also point out the similar pathway for non-steam users, just in case somebody doesn't know:

c:\    Program files (x86)   Enterbrain    RPGVXAce  Generator   Face

Pretty swanky stuff, Meg!  Keep it coming!

 

[Amysaurus]

Welp. Insomnia decided to be a sweetheart and visit me tonight, so I finally got around to following this tutorial! For some reason I decided that I'd make myself edit these only using the parts that were randomly chosen, so most of the more significant differences were either drawn in or made with the original parts.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this! I guess I kind of shrugged the generator off after I saw how bizarre most of the results are. I spent about 20-30 minutes on each edit, so it's nice to see that it doesn't take an absurd amount of effort to get some fairly nice results.

 

[Sharm]

Woah, creepy face went from creepy to rockstar handsome! Nice!