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 morphs 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-morphs, 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 head-shaping morphs could be used to change a base mesh to create unique and recognizeable individuals
Experimenting with a variety of morphs inspired by other systems let us create a very versatile but realistic system. Our final system proved that we could viably make different characters from the same base mesh using morph configurations.
All of the following characters are created from the same base head, which is shared across all characters in the game.
Configuration files are used to load in a unique scientists profile of facial morph settings, skin and unique subobjects (such as helmets, glasses, and more)
