And now for the new heads

So you've seen what sort of controls the new face morpher has. Now let's see what it can do when you push those sliders around a bit.

You may not actually want characters this extreme, of course, but this demonstrates that Moviestorm 1.3.1 will offer a lot more flexibility and customisation than the current version.

New character workshop - first glimpse

I promised you a look at the new character shop as soon as I got something from the team in Cambridge. I found this waiting for me when I got up this morning, so here you go. I haven't even had breakfast yet!

Moviestorm Dave

Note: This is still work in progress and quite rough in places, so you'll see some broken icons on these shots. There's also a noticeable neck seam on these characters: Dave's fixed this, but the new neck code hasn't been integrated with the character workshop code yet. However, this will give you an idea of what the new face creator and character workshop will look like, and how much more you'll be able to do with Moviestorm 1.3.1 compared to the current version.

These don't show the more extreme characters we can do - this is just to illustrate the user interface and the range of controls. See shots of the new heads here!

First off, we've replaced the old grey background with a dressing room. The set isn't final, but already it feels much more friendly and fun to use. You also get a sense of what these characters will look like in context, which makes an enormous difference.

Now, this is the bit most of you have been waiting for. Check out the new face morph controls. (Click on the images to see them full size.) You get a huge array of sliders to play with, allowing you to control:

• Ethnicity - this allows you to mix between different basic ethnic head shapes
• Head Variant - several different face shapes
• Nose shape & size
• Ear shape and size
• Mouth shape
• Lip shape
• Eyebrows shape & size
• Eye depth, size and shape
• Eyelashes

Let's take a closer look at the eyebrows, and see the range of variants available. Twelve different shapes, all of which can be tinted.

Next there's the new make-up. Add a design and colour it. We'll have some more conventional make-up, of course, but we can also do some more extreme things.

So there you go.

Now, where's my coffee and a cinnamon bun?

That's not fair!

I just had my regular weekly catch-up session with Johnnie, where I get to find out about what's being worked on this week. We were talking about the face morphs, and he told me "I really should send you a video of the faces being morphed in the character shop in real time. You're going to love it."

So I made the appropriate excited noises, and then he said, "I could actually have sent you something last week, but we all know that as soon as you see what we're doing, you're going to put it on the dev blog, and we won't be able to stop you. And it's not ready yet, so we're going to hold off for a few more days."

So there you go. You can all share my pain.

You'll see the new stuff about 15 minutes after I do.

But apparently you're going to love it.