Posing & Expressions

Sumugi gives you detailed control over how your characters look and feel in each panel. You can pose their bodies, direct their gaze, and set their facial expressions, all from within the 3D View.

Posing a Character

Using the Armature

Clicking on a character's body reveals their armature, a set of purple objects representing the character's bone joints. You can manually adjust individual bones to create custom poses.

• Click a bone to select it and bring up a transform gizmo
• Drag the gizmo to rotate or reposition that bone
• Some bones, such as the head and neck, are hidden by default and only become selectable after another bone has been selected first

Using Saved Poses

For quicker posing, Sumugi includes a library of pre-made poses that can be applied in one click. To access it, click on a character's body to open the action menu, then select Set Pose.

The Set Pose panel lets you browse poses by category and apply them in several ways:

• Full Body - applies the pose to the entire character
• Upper Body - applies the pose from the waist up only
• Lower Body - applies the pose from the waist down only
• Hands - applies the pose to the left or right hand only

This flexibility lets you mix and match saved poses, for example, applying a walking pose to the lower body while keeping a custom upper body position.

Saving a Custom Pose

Once you've manually adjusted a character's pose, you can save it for future use. Click the character's body to open the action menu and select Save Pose. Saved poses appear in your My Assets library and can be shared to the Asset Marketplace for other creators to use.

Other Character Actions

The action menu also gives you quick access to:

• Swap Character - replace the current character with a different one while keeping their position in the scene
• Lock Character - prevent accidental edits to the character
• Hide Character - toggle the character's visibility in the scene

Facial Expressions

Clicking on a character's face opens the expression panel, where you can set what emotion or expression the character is showing.

Preset Expressions

The Presets tab displays a grid of pre-made expressions for the character. Expressions are filterable by emotion category, such as happy, sad, surprised, angry, and neutral, using the icons at the top of the panel. Click any preset to apply it instantly.

Custom Expressions

The Custom tab gives you granular slider control over individual facial features, organized into three sections:

Basic - controls for the eyes, including spread, close, blink, squint, and wide variations for both left and right sides independently.

Eyebrows - controls for eyebrow position and angle, including inner, outer, and extra variations for both sides.

Details - controls for fine eye details such as iris visibility, highlight visibility, and eye direction (look up, down, left, right).

Saving a Custom Expression

Custom expressions can be saved as presets for reuse. Click the save button at the bottom of the Custom tab to open the Save Expression as Preset dialog:

• Title - give your expression a name (required)
• Description - add an optional description
• Asset Tags - tag your expression with at least one emotion category (Happy, Sad, Surprised, Angry, Neutral) to make it easier to find later

Saved expressions appear in your My Assets library and can be uploaded to the Asset Marketplace for other creators to use.

Look-At

The Look-At feature lets you control where a character's head and eyes are directed without manually adjusting the neck or eye bones.

When Look-At is active, two purple control dots appear on the character:

• Head dot - drag to turn the character's head toward a target
• Eye dot - drag to move just the eyes independently of the head

This allows for nuanced performances, for example, a character whose head faces forward but whose eyes glance to the side.

⚠️ Important: Activating Look-At will reset any manual adjustments you've made to the head or neck armature. If you plan to use both Look-At and manual bone adjustments, always set your Look-At direction first, then make manual tweaks afterward.

Tips

Layer your poses. Use a full-body saved pose as a starting point, then refine individual bones manually to add personality and avoid characters looking too rigid or identical across panels.

Match expressions to the shot. Close-up panels are a great opportunity to use detailed custom expressions, subtle eyebrow and eye adjustments can convey a lot of emotion that would be lost in a wider shot.

Use Look-At to guide the reader's eye. A character looking toward another character or off-panel can create a sense of direction and tension that helps lead the reader through your story.