Faceposer

Faceposer playing back a complex scene with multiple actors.

Faceposer is the SDK tool used to produce choreographed sequences for the Source engine. It can create facial expressions (including lip-syncing), manage skeletal animations, the position and movement of actors in the world, and any map triggers that need to be fired during a scene.

• See Choreography creation for a step-by step guide to creating choreography in the Source engine.
• See Faceposer reference for a quick-reference guide to the different parts of the Faceposer interface.

Note:To use Faceposer with your own 2013-based mod, you'll need to set the VPROJECT environment variable to the game directory of your mod.

The simplest way to do so is to create a batch file or shortcut launching the executable with the -game launch parameter pointing to the mod's folder.

Note:All imported audio should be WAV files encoded as compressed 4-bit MS-ADPCM or uncompressed 16-bit PCM. The sampling rate can either be 11025 Hz, 22050 Hz, or 44100 Hz.

Issues

• Faceposer (in pre- games) has missing icons for the Play / Stop / Pause buttons. To fix this, extract this to your SDK's bin (or hl2 / gamedir) folder. Another way to do this would be to extract the files from gfx/hlfaceposer from the game's main VPK. This is fixed in Scenemaker.
• The Phoneme Extractor is broken by default. This can be fixed by using the Lipsinc Speech API instead of the default Microsoft Speech API. This is fixed in Scenemaker.
• The Textured Render view only displays missing textures. Try using Smoothshaded or Flatshaded instead. This is fixed in Scenemaker.
• Faceposer has some trouble loading debug materials, and will spam the Output window constantly when it uses them. This can cause the program to stutter quite a bit. You can try replacing your MaterialSystem.dll with this to silence these errors. This is fixed in Scenemaker.
• Faceposer will also, in semi-rare cases, spam the Output window with Invalid controller index, and eventually crash. It is unknown what exactly causes this.
• If models fail to load, or Faceposer is no longer starting/perpetually crashing, try deleting the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\faceposer registry key, and delete the hlfaceposer.rf file inside your SDK's bin folder.
• If your mod uses custom shaders, Faceposer will fail to render any materials that use them when it's launched via VPROJECT. You'll need to launch Faceposer with the -game parameter pointing to the game directory of your mod.
• Similar to HLMV, opening folders inside of the "Load model..." browser will give you an error if said folder only exists within a VPK. A fix would be to input the model path directly whitout exploring folders.