Portal 2 Commentary Regarding Wheatley
The following information was found at the Portal 2 text dump at GameFAQs by oblivion from aoc and is from the commentary in Portal 2.
"THE EYE HAS IT"
"[Karen Prell] How do you make a giant mechanical eyeball express life and emotions, let alone give the impression that he's talking when he has no mouth? The animator's understanding of human behavior came in handy for bringing Wheatley the personality sphere to life. Talking is so much more than just moving a character's mouth. You have to use body language, head attitudes and rhythm of movement and eye focus to indicate a character's feelings and motivations. Slow, smooth head moves, a steady gaze and a relaxed eye aperture indicate that Wheatley is calm. Short, sharp head turns, rapid blinks and glancing around indicate nervousness or deceit. Add a tightly constricted eye aperture and a little shiver to show fear. Tilting the body away while keeping the eye focused on the player signals an attempt at cleverness that ultimately only fools Wheatley himself. Suspicion is communicated by squinting his eyelids and handles, which function as very expressive eyebrows and cheeks. It's also fun to remind the player that Wheatley is a machine. When hacking, his eye and body segments become perfectly centered and spin mechanically, inspired by the spinning tape reels on old Univac computers. And when he wants to look far in front, he flips his eye all the way over to the other side of his head. This animation approach combined with the writing and vocals makes Wheatley quite a unique and entertaining character--part human, part machine, all eye, and no brain."
"WHEATLEY MODEL"
"[Richard Lord] The Wheatley model was designed as a mechanical version of the original Portal 1 personality sphere. Originally they filled a very similar role to that in Portal 1, so we needed one base model which could hold a lot of different expressions. Experimenting with different rigging ideas we came up with the onion skin design where a number of spherical plates could slide around inside each other all supported on a small motion platform mounted on a gyroscope. This meant that no matter what expression Wheatley was pulling, he always retained his spherical shape. The modelers and the animators collaborated closely on these early tests to make sure the design supported the range of expression needed to satisfy any personality sphere that got designed. Lots of ideas were thrown out, such as a small internal robot arm that Wheatley could pull out of one of his ports and pull himself around with. We were careful to make the mechanics look plausible, but we had to cheat the eyelids, since they ended up being a physical impossibility. There was no way all that geometry could fit into the space around his eye without clipping out the other side, but they were such an essential feature of the model that we resorted to crushing them up inside the eye where the player can't see them."
"THE EYE HAS IT"
"[Karen Prell] How do you make a giant mechanical eyeball express life and emotions, let alone give the impression that he's talking when he has no mouth? The animator's understanding of human behavior came in handy for bringing Wheatley the personality sphere to life. Talking is so much more than just moving a character's mouth. You have to use body language, head attitudes and rhythm of movement and eye focus to indicate a character's feelings and motivations. Slow, smooth head moves, a steady gaze and a relaxed eye aperture indicate that Wheatley is calm. Short, sharp head turns, rapid blinks and glancing around indicate nervousness or deceit. Add a tightly constricted eye aperture and a little shiver to show fear. Tilting the body away while keeping the eye focused on the player signals an attempt at cleverness that ultimately only fools Wheatley himself. Suspicion is communicated by squinting his eyelids and handles, which function as very expressive eyebrows and cheeks. It's also fun to remind the player that Wheatley is a machine. When hacking, his eye and body segments become perfectly centered and spin mechanically, inspired by the spinning tape reels on old Univac computers. And when he wants to look far in front, he flips his eye all the way over to the other side of his head. This animation approach combined with the writing and vocals makes Wheatley quite a unique and entertaining character--part human, part machine, all eye, and no brain."
"WHEATLEY MODEL"
"[Richard Lord] The Wheatley model was designed as a mechanical version of the original Portal 1 personality sphere. Originally they filled a very similar role to that in Portal 1, so we needed one base model which could hold a lot of different expressions. Experimenting with different rigging ideas we came up with the onion skin design where a number of spherical plates could slide around inside each other all supported on a small motion platform mounted on a gyroscope. This meant that no matter what expression Wheatley was pulling, he always retained his spherical shape. The modelers and the animators collaborated closely on these early tests to make sure the design supported the range of expression needed to satisfy any personality sphere that got designed. Lots of ideas were thrown out, such as a small internal robot arm that Wheatley could pull out of one of his ports and pull himself around with. We were careful to make the mechanics look plausible, but we had to cheat the eyelids, since they ended up being a physical impossibility. There was no way all that geometry could fit into the space around his eye without clipping out the other side, but they were such an essential feature of the model that we resorted to crushing them up inside the eye where the player can't see them."