Lip Syncing

[Lumpy]

Hello all,

I understand that AS has it's own lip syncing feature, but if a guy wanted to have a more hands-on feel to it, what would you recommend? A switch layer with different mouth shapes in it? Or would you mold the mouth manually for each sound?

[Danimal]

Switch layers will be far quicker and easier. There is an "interpolate" feature which makes the mouth movements smoother, though I personally have never much cared for the effect.

The good news is there's a ton of tutorials out there to help get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... orial&sm=3

[heyvern]

The "mold for each sound" idea isn't bad either.

I've seen some people here use smart bones for just a few key mouth shapes then they mix and match to do lip sync effectively. I haven't tried it yet but what I've seen really looks like a fun and easy way to have more control. Because you use smart bones with "key" shapes that can be mixed, you can add in additional expressions like frowning and smiling to change up the look. The animation of the lip sync will take longer to do since you can't use the automated lip sync built in to AS.

Danimal is correct, using standard phoneme switch layers allows you to use the built in automatic lip syncing that is much faster to animate. However creating the 10 mouth shapes ahead of time can take some time and having the ability to be more "creative" with smart bone lip syncing can give better results. It's a trade off.

[Lumpy]

I believe selgin had made a demo using smart bones to show off the range of motion on a characters eyes and mouth, and lip synced in the same way. That was the video that really made me go, "Whoa. Okay, this is something great." At any rate, thank you for your replies, gives me some room to experiment.

[funksmaname]

not sure if it helps, but I made a similar tutorial thing here:

[Thrashador]

I personally like the combination of switch layers and interpolated mouth positions (phonemes). However, it's helpful to have a configuration where your mouth can be happy, neutral, or sad. Even within the same line of dialogue, you can add subtlety to the expression by switching from a happy mouth to a sad one, for example.

It looks like this:

Mouth Switch Layer
--Happy (Switch Layer)
-----10 vector layers for happy phonemes
--Neutral (Switch Layer)
-----10 vector layers for neutral phonemes
--Sad (Switch Layer)
-----10 vector layers for sad phonemes

Even after using Papagayo or auto lip sync, I usually go through and key in phonemes by hand until it's right.

Thrashador

[amanandink]

Hey lumpy

We tend to use the switch layer approach for both lip sync and expressions.
If your interested in seeing how our switch layer for mouths are set up we posted it to the forum a while back here

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24196

And your can download the rig here
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vloc1mbrpj6zm ... _sc005.zip

Jeremy