How to add new custom emoticon?

October 3, 2022 - 2:08pm by Ann_U

Hello!
I would like to know how can I add a new custom emoticon for Blink? I want to markup text that will be reused by several characters so it would be useful to link a lot of stuff to emoticons.
I would appreciate a detail tutorial on how to add custom emoticons (as for dummies=)).
Thanks!

For something like a blink, you probably want it to have the same duration scale each time it is triggered right? There is no point in having the character keep his eyes closed for the duration of a word or sentence right? If you use the 2+ character emoticons, you need to insert them as a pair that surround a word or a group of words.

Consider the following example with the ## emoticon:

My custom animation will play ## now ##

Whatever animation you define in EmoticonEvents/## , if it's original duration was 1 second, it will be stretched/squashed so that it's new duration is equal to the amount of time it takes to say the word "now". So if it only takes 100ms to say the word "now", the animation will play at 10x speed.

For something like a blink, it's probably better to use punctuation events, which do not need to be added to text in pairs. Just add the single punctuation character to the text, and the event it will generate will play at the speed you authored the animation. The only downside to using punctuation events is that you can only create 18 of them because that's how many punctuation characters we define. If you need more you would need to use the 2+ character variety, but always insert both emoticons immediately one after the other separated by a single space:


My custom animation will play at normal speed now ## ##

So for a super quick tutorial:

  1. Add a punctuation character ~@#$%^&*()-_=+;:’` to your text where you want your animation to play
  2. Analyze the audio and text
  3. Go to the events tab and double-click on the generated event. This will create a new animation in the right place for the event to trigger.
  4. Define your custom animation.

Hi Doug!
Thanks for the reply!
i would like to link my new emoticons so they will be triggered automatically as there are a lot of lines and linking manually each custom emoticon for each line would be a lot of work. I was looking to replicate the same process default emotions do, so I would just need to insert emoticon in text line and that's it.

Hi Ann,

You don’t need to link each line to the emoticon. The process I outlined is done only for the first time you create the emoticon animation. All lines that use that emoticon will then be “linked” when you analyze. The double-clicking on the event is just an easy way to create the emoticon animation with the correct name and group name so everything works.