The Cue Baker¶
The tool that turns a recording, and optionally its transcript, into the cues the runtime face plays. What the window holds, and the workflow around it.
What a Bake Is¶
Audio goes in. Cues come out, written to a file beside the clip.
A bake happens once, in the editor, on your machine. Nothing about it runs in a build, and nothing about it runs at play time. What goes into the build is the cue file, and the runtime reads it. If that model is unfamiliar, read Cues, Not Keyframes first, because everything below assumes it.
Open the window from FaceCue ▸ Cue Baker, or from the tile in the Hub.
The Window¶
Two halves. The left is a bake, top to bottom in the order you fill it in: the audio, the transcript, the recognizer, where the output goes, the button, the result. The right is the settings pane, which governs how a bake is processed and which you can ignore. See The Settings Pane for why it is there and why you can.
The rest of this page walks the left half.
Audio¶
Mode chooses Single Clip or Batch.
Single Clip is one recording, which you point at with the Audio Clip field. That field takes either an asset dragged in from the Project window or a path to a file on disk, whichever you have. Both resolve to the same thing.
Batch is a folder of them, with transcripts found for each. It has its own workflow and its own page: Batch Baking.
You do not need audio to start. A typed transcript with no audio is a valid state, and the bake button will offer to synthesize the speech for you.
Transcript¶
Source chooses where the words come from.
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| Plain Text | Type or paste the script straight into the window |
| TXT Sidecar | A text file, typically sitting beside the audio |
| CSV Index | One spreadsheet holding the lines for many clips, matched by clip name |
| Articy XML | An Articy export, when the Articy integration is enabled |
Plain Text keeps what you type. The other three re-read from their source, so a change on disk shows up here rather than being quietly overridden by something you typed earlier. The two are kept separate on purpose, so neither can clobber the other.
This field is also where transcript tags go, which is the most powerful thing in the baker and the easiest to overlook.
If you have no transcript, open Generate Transcript and FaceCue will write one from the audio. That is usually better than baking without one. The reasoning, and the model choice it offers, are in Recognizers.
Recognizer¶
Which language, which reading strategy, and which part of your computer does the work. This is the section that decides bake quality, and it has its own page: Recognizers.
Output¶
Output Path is where the cue file is written. Leave it empty and the file lands next to the audio it was baked from, which is the sensible thing most of the time, and is what an empty field means here instead of unconfigured.
In batch that empty field is doing more work than it looks like. Each cue file goes beside its own audio, so a batch drawn from several folders writes back into each of them. Set a folder to gather everything in one place instead.
Overwrite Policy¶
A cue file can be edited by hand in the Cue Clip Composer, which makes a re-bake destructive. So the baker asks what to do about clips that already have one.
| Policy | What happens |
|---|---|
| Skip | Only bakes clips with no cue file yet. Existing ones are left exactly as they are, edits included. |
| Overwrite | Bakes everything again, replacing what is there. |
| Ask | Prompts when it finds existing output, then does what you chose. |
Overwriting Keeps a Backup
Before replacing anything, the existing cue files and their emotion sidecars are copied into a cue_bak~ folder beside them, one timestamped subfolder per run. Nothing is lost silently. How many runs are kept is itself a setting.
Override Clip Name Advanced replaces the name taken from the audio file. It sets both the output filename and the clip name stored inside the cue file, so the two never disagree.
Bake¶
One button, and it reads what you have given it.
With audio and a transcript it bakes. With audio and no transcript it offers to generate one and then bake. With a typed transcript and no audio it offers to synthesize the audio and then bake. Whichever it is, the button says so.
If it is disabled, the line above it says what is missing.
Results¶
When the bake finishes, two dropdowns sit under the result.
Show In takes you to what was produced. Cue Clip Composer opens it for review, which is the one worth building a habit around. Project selects it in Unity, and Explorer opens the containing folder. A destination that does not apply to this bake is greyed out instead of hidden, so the list does not change shape on you.
Add To registers the output so the runtime can find it by name. Registry is the standard path and is covered in The Cue Registry. Addressables appears when that package is installed.
A Baked File Is Not Yet a Findable One
Baking writes the cue file. It does not tell the runtime the file exists.
At play time a character looks the clip up by name, in the registry assigned to it and then across the project's registries. A clip that was baked but never added is not in either, so it plays with a still mouth. The Console says so, naming the clip and how many registries were searched, which is the message to look for when a line you know you baked does nothing.