Half Sword - Face2Animation

Description

Half Sword's faces never move. You can take a man apart limb by limb and he looks exactly as bored as he did standing still. That always bothered me, so I fixed it.

WillieFace gives the heads a real set of facial shapes, teeth, a tongue and an actual mouth, and hooks a script into the game's own events so the face reacts to what is happening to it.

Installation instructions

• []Close the game.[/]

  []Extract the archive into your Half Sword folder (Steam: right-click, Manage, Browse local files). It matches the game's own layout, so everything lands where it belongs. Create the Content\Paks\~mods folder if it isn't there.[/]

  []Tell UE4SS to load it. Open this file with Notepad:

  Half Sword\HalfswordUE5\Binaries\Win64\ue4ss\Mods\mods.txtScroll to the bottom. You'll see a line that reads ; Built-in keybinds, do not move up! followed by a few entries. Add this line just ABOVE that comment, on its own line:

  WillieFace : 1Spaces around the colon, exactly as written, and it must sit above that comment or UE4SS will ignore it. Save and close.[/]

  []Play.[/]

  To remove it, delete zWillieFace_P.pak and the WillieFace mod folder, and take that line back out.

  Main features

  Hit someone and they flinch — eyes wide first, the wince a moment later, and harder blows hurt more. Corner a man and he'll beg, then cry, then just sob. Open his throat and he spends his last seconds gasping with a face that never quite settles. When he finally goes, the jaw takes a few seconds to fall open.

  The rest is the small stuff that sells it. Brows that furrow the forehead, crow's feet, eyes that dart about and blink unevenly, everyone breathing at his own rhythm, nobody's face quite symmetric. Mouths move while they shout, driven by curves built from the game's own voice recordings.

  Requirements

  Half Sword, tested on the July 2026 Steam build, and UE4SS v3. 0. 1. Nothing else.

  Honest limits

  Six heads are covered: Willie, Frank, Hans, Henrish, Konrad and Matteo. The old Willie_OG mesh isn't. The mouth moves convincingly while someone shouts but doesn't match the actual words. And the lower teeth don't follow the jaw yet, so a wide scream shows them as one fused row — that's the first thing I'm fixing.

  No support, sorry. I made this for myself and I'm not going to troubleshoot installs or chase game patches. If it breaks, delete two files and you're back to stock.

  Made with full AI assistance, start to finish. Better you hear it from me.

  The pak carries Half Sword's own head meshes with the facial shapes added; there's no way to ship it otherwise. They belong to Half Sword Games, I asked on their Discord before releasing this, and it comes down if they want it down.

  Shout outs

  Half Sword Games. USC ICT for ICT-FaceKit and NVIDIA for Audio2Face-3D, both released openly. The UE4SS and FModel teams. And the Half Sword modding community, who worked all this out long before I turned up.