Aligning head position often makes the difference between a top-tier photo and an everyday snapshot, and Lighty Lights offers some extraordinary tools that help you go far above and beyond what the vanilla/in-game tools can provide. There are several ways to set head positions for photos.
A. Find poses that have the head in the correct position without alteration
A simple one (that is easy to forget because of how “obvious” it is) is finding a pose that starts with the character’s head in the correct position (or close to it). You can frequently find poses similar to one another that only have a head movement variation, or you can use a different frame of your animation that has the head in a slightly different place.
B. Use the in-game camera to position one or more characters
The vanilla tool that comes with the game’s photo mode is the “Look at Camera” feature, which can get you pretty far just on its own. To use it, open photo mode, find the “Character Settings” tab, and look under the “Expressions” field. Check the box to have the selected character look at the camera. You can do this for as many characters as you like.
If you use the “Look at Camera” feature without any other programs or mods enabled, when you move the camera, the characters will move their heads along with it.
Some poses and animations have more or less mobility of the head, so if you keep trying to get a character to look in a certain direction but they won’t no matter what, odds are that you might be facing one of these.
C. Use Otis_Inf “FreeCam” to set the head position.
The game’s camera is separate from any other cameras that can be used with the game, so using something like Otis_Inf’s tools can allow you to move your in-game/vanilla camera to the position in which your character(s) will be looking at it, but then take the picture from another place.
First, move the in-game camera to where you want the character’s focus to be. Be prepared for unflattering, up close and personal perspectives.
Then, activate Otis_Inf, and pan out to the place from which you want to take your shot.
The characters continue to look at where the in-game camera’s position was last reported, while you can fly around freely. With some careful positioning of the cam between two individuals (or, not rarely, inside one of the pair’s head), you can get the two to appear to look at each other – at the expense of body horror.
Worth it.
D. Use Lighty Lights to set head position [basic].
This section is deprecated and only applies to Lighty Lights 1.5.2 and earlier.
If you’d like to avoid some eldritch jumpscares in your photography sessions, however, you can use Lighty Lights to move the head position instead. Lighty Lights has a feature that essentially functions as a surrogate for the camera position, allowing you to manoeuvre and manipulate the target of the dummies’ attention without having to actually move the camera. In the “PM” tab, near the very bottom, you will find “Look at” as a feature. Manoeuvring these sliders will allow you to move the “second camera”/target of the dummies’ head movement.
You can create a marker to help you follow the position visually as well.
Your dummies will track it like cats on a laser pointer.
The marker moves relatively quickly, so use very small increments. If you ever lose the marker, however, you can always click “Move to cam” and then, in essence, start fresh on its position.
You can also delete the marker at any time with the “Delete” button next to it. This does NOT delete the position of the Lighty Lights “Look at” point, just the red crystalline marker for it. In order to reset it, make sure that “Disable head follow the camera thing” checkbox is empty, then move your in-game camera (even slightly).
Last, but not least, if you don’t want the dummies to follow the actual in-game camera with their heads, but instead stay focused on the point you set in Lighty Lights, make sure the “Disable head follow the camera thing” box is checked.
E. Use Lighty Lights to set complex head positions
This section is deprecated and only applies to Lighty Lights 1.5.2 and earlier.
In method “D” the Lighty Lights “Look at” feature just works as a surrogate for the camera, allowing you to avoid using Otis_Inf or other complicated means of aligning shots. However, this function in conjunction with the positional features in Lighty Lights available in the “PM” tab also can be utilised to accomplish an even more complicated goal – having dummies look at different points set by the photographer.
The basic foundation of this is the fact that moving dummies in Lighty Lights does not cause the game to recalculate their head angles, and the functionality of Lighty Lights’ dummy movement is in essence not recognised by the vanilla tools, so it will continue to think that your dummy is where it was last moved in the “true” photo mode tools (or where it started if you did not move them at all). This can be used to photographers’ advantage.
Imagine that we want to have the two characters facing opposite walls. In order to do this, select one character and have that character look at the camera. After the first dummy’s head is correctly in position, use the “Yaw” rotational feature in the “PM” tab of Lighty Lights to rotate them – here, we’ll do about 180 degrees. Note how the head’s absolute position (still looking to the dummy’s left) does not change and does not track the light as she is turned.
Then, select your second character and rotate them in vanilla photo mode before enabling “Look at camera.”
Once the dummy is in a position where they will turn to look at the marker in the same direction you would like them to be facing for your photo, enable “Look at camera.”
Finish moving them the rest of the way in the Lighty Lights rotational tool, and let your angsty and movie poster designer sides run wild.
You can even sketch out ahead of time where you want characters to look and reverse-engineer where they need to look in order to achieve your final result. Remember that if you mess up a dummy’s position you can always “reset” them by moving them with the vanilla photo mode movement sliders.
Last, but not least, don’t forget about eye position. If the head is mostly positioned correctly, but the eyes are somewhere else, it tells a different story than if the eyes are focused in line with the head. Make sure the eye placement serves as a finishing touch to the thought you were trying to assemble in your shot, rather than being an out-of-place “oopsie.” “Vanilla Expressions Enhanced” and “A.P.E.X. – Additional Photo Mode Expressions” are two very good and easy to use options, and otherwise you can find some variability in eyelines with QSAT as well.