Having engaging dialog is one of the great struggles that game designers face, I think. Players love to skip dialog, especially if it feels phoned in.
One of the best ways to fix that is to give the players something interesting to look at while they're reading. The people who are in conversation should make interesting faces and emote the way real people do.
But posing characters for that is a hassle. When there are upwards of 30 characters that need portraits taken for various emotions, it goes from a hassle to completely untenable.
Unless... there was some way to do it quickly, using other animations that already exist.
And thus, the Portrait Capture Tool was born.
Built on the backbone of the Animation Previewer, the Portrait Capture Tool expands on the features of its sister tool by adding camera and light setup, pose storage and recall, and multiple portrait options.
It has been used extensively since its creation, and not just by the design team. Marketing has started using it to generate characters with transparent backgrounds that they can use to quickly build new content. The art team has used it as a starting point for mocking up illustrations. The character art team has used it to do nearly identical side-by-sides for different versions of characters.
Its use and utility has grown exponentially since I started working on it, and it does not seem to be slowing down. I have a log of feature requests from the design team, the UI team, the marketing team, and the art team.
Exciting times.
