Overview
Tips for better Comedy Night character animation and facial expressions with keyboard shortcuts.
Introduction
First of all, you don’t have to control your character’s motions at all. It will move it’s eyes, eyelids and head perfectly fine on its own if you want to focus on your jokes.
Second, for clarity I focus on keyboard shortcuts. Feel free to mention controller defaults in the comments, I’ll check them out and edit in when I have a minute.
General movement
Big part of your act is the movement of the eyes and the head itself. Former follow the mouse courser, hold and drag left mouse button to move the latter. You can easily look at a specific character in the audience, roll your eyes up, tilt the head down for dramatic effects, look to the side when trying to recall a joke and many, many more.
Moods
This is the only way to influence your character’s mouth (other than speaking). There are three basic moods that your character can be in – tap to switch – these moods exclude each other:
- R – positive, a smirk or smile, eyelids default to wide open
- F – neutral, straight face, eyelids default to wide open or relaxed
- V – negative, frown, eyelids default to squint
In all three you can control eyes, eyelids and eyebrows separately. On top of that you have two modifiers – press and hold (one or both at the same time) – those allow you to derive more moods from the basic ones:
- A – emotional
- D – angry
Your character will often break a mood and display all kinds of behaviours on its own, including but not limited to temporary squints, smirks, growls, head, hands and torso movements. It will, however, always get back to the currently set default state.
Eyelids
Eyelids default to state determined by the current mood. It resets after blinking. You can’t do anything about it, e.g. when in negative mood your character will periodically squint eyes no matter what you do.
- Z – squint (toggle)
- X – blink (hold to keep closed)
- C – relaxed (toggle)
Eyebrows
It’s a big one. Nothing can say sarcasm like a sole eyebrow twitch. Eyebrows are controlled by modifiers, so press and hold. Basic movements include:
- Q – raise left
- E – raise right
- W – raise both
- S – lower both
Especially effective when combined with mood modifiers and moods.
Lip sync
Comedy Night incorporates a very basic, very simple lip syncing algorithm. I mention it for completeness sake really but it’s worth to keep in mind you can use it to, for example, do an O face if you hold a space bar (voice shortcut) and just say Ooooh (or let the static came through if your microphone happens to be of those noisy ones).
Let the magic happen
Animation is a skill people acquire by countless hours of playing with their puppets. When they know them well they can easily give them expressions that project a great spectrum of clear and mixed feelings. And all of that can change in an instant along with the context of your act. You can flash evil smiles by rising angry eyebrows in positive mood (tap R then hold W and D). Replace angry with emotional (release D and hold A) to get flirty smooth. Look at the lady in the first row and compliment her lovely figure to switch from flirty to plain dirty without moving a muscle and listen to the whistles of the audience. Frown your lips (tap V) and close your eyes (hold X) shaking head side to side (left mouse button drag) for the gesture of a pure disgust. Just try everything and you’ll get your snake brows achievement* no-time!
*) not an actual achievement, sorry