Black Mesa Face-Creation System
Designed and built by Carlos Montero & Ivan Vavilov
The face creation system I have designed for Black Mesa is a very sophisticated yet simple system that allows us to create a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity. The system utilizes a base face mesh to derive phenomes and other core assets that drive the facial animation system. On top of this system, it uses an optomized set of face-shaping facial flexors in real-time to deform any given face into a pre-configured appearance. The result is that in real-time we can configure any given character in game to use a combination of face-flexors, textures and submodels to create a unique individual character. Because of this system we are striving to have every character in Black Mesa have a unique personality and face.
Early testing let us prove that face-shaping flexes could be used to change a base mesh to create unique and recognizeable individuals
Experimenting with a variety of flexes inspired by other systems let us create a very versatile but realistic system of flexes.
Our final system proved that we could viably make different characters from the same base mesh using configurations.
All of the following characters are created from the same base male head, which is shared across all male characters in the game.
Configuration files are used to load in a unique scientists profile of facial flexes, skin and unique subobjects (such as helmets, glasses, and more)
