Most face textures only have a default neutral face expression, some however are a bit over the top. If i wanted to make a character with a specific face expression sometimes it might not exist.
So there's potential for improvement here. What I'm suggesting is that; for each face I.E. Young Face 4, there should be a drop down menu under the "Face" menu for "Expression", and this menu should have a variety of states in it "Elated, happy, sad, angry, malicious
, shocked, disapproving, Serious, Trollololo
, worried, afraid, BIG SMILE, Grin, and maybe something "Insane"
. and why not Awesomeface
.
This would provide a version of these face textures in these forms. Selecting an expression would make that the "default" expression for that costume.
This would mean actually changing these textures. I can do some of it, it's easiest to;
have a copy of the face texture> paste it on a flat plane subdivide the plane to have mouth and eye and eyebrow regions and then merely animate the plane and bake (render) to a new texture the same size etc. that way these modified textures would fit the original UV layout exactly.
If one of the devs would be kind enough to extract the face images and post a rar or zip or 7z here I'd be glad to begin modifying them and see what we can get. Even just one random face texture to start with could be used to prototype this idea visually and see if it's worth going further.
as for the rest, it'd be an addition to the costume/character designer.
As a second thought, it'd be great if we could include face expression changes onto the CoH Emotes. Or somehow allow players to switch their face expression by keypress (maybe for a limited time before reverting back to the chosen default expression).
I do not know how to extract them from the client source code..
