Phonemes destroy emotions/facial expressions

[The schmeat beat]

So today I created phonemes on a heavy that already had some animated facial expression (going from happy to sad, I want him to speak as soon as he got sad).

The problem is, as soon as I applied the phonemes, all of the facial expression (I did those expressions with the "emotion" tab, not manually) was gone and the heavy was back to his standard idle face. (The phonemes themselfe worked)

I don't think I have ever had this problem (or if I did, I can't remember it, not sure), but its really annoying. So why is this happening?

[Zappy]

Because phoneme extractions override what is already there.

[Pte Jack]

I usually apply the phoneme first then adjust the facial expression from there. As Vintage says, the phonemes will overwrite anything that has been done.

[Zappy]

Technical stuff: The way phoneme extraction works is that it analyzes the sound first to see what sounds/shapes should be where, then applies pre-made combinations of flexes correctly, to match the shape the mouth should make. Well, it tries to do it correctly, but some times it fails. Anyway, those combinations have the values defined of how much each flex should be used. That includes values of 0 (and/or 0.5) for "non-used" flexes, which is both what keeps the flexes from breaking while extracting phonemes, and what removes all mouth animation that was already there.