Lip sync: Papagayo vs manual

[nina_paley]

I'm playing with Papagayo today. It looks promising for high volume that doesn't have to be tight. But for really good lip-sync I think I'd have to do so much manual fine-tuning it wouldn't save time over doing it manually all the way through. (I am quite fast at manual lip sync in Flash.) What "reads" best in lip sync often strays from the phonemes comprising the written words. Animators here, do you sync manually or with Papagayo or some of both? Or is there some new tool that's not Papagayo I should know about?

[synthsin75]

I totally agree about what "reads" well. I tend to use Papagayo or the AS/Moho auto lip sync, but I only use five or six base phonemes. I just use duplicates as similar shaped phonemes, so they work with Preston Blair lip syncing but don't have so many different shapes that they are hard to "read", especially with fast dialog.

[funksmaname]

This is a smart, quick technique someone recently posted...


My current thinking is to do lipsync in 3 passes;
1) open closed
2) ooo / eee
3) mood with smart warp overlay

I haven't done any long dialogue sequences for a while but will probably put this to the test and make a tutorial about it at some point...

[Greenlaw]

For Moho, I just keyframe manually. It's pretty easy since since the audio scrubbing is quite good and you can notate the timeline. For keyframing I use the Ctrl-Alt-Right Click shortcut to pop up the switch list over the mouth and select from there--it's very quick if you've named the mouth shapes appropriately. I find it a whole lot faster and easier than right-clicking on the Switch Layer, which is probably buried several layers deep in the Layers panel. There's also Alt-D and -C to change shapes but this cycles up and down the entire list, so it's not especially quick if you have a long list of mouth shapes.

After getting the mouth shapes keyframed, I'll go over the scene again transforming the Switch Layer directly to squash, stretch and reposition the mouth as needed. This creates a convincing illusion that you're using more mouth shapes in the animation and it helps smooth the transitions between extreme shapes. For some characters, I might add a jaw bone to move the chin or set up a Smart Bone to move the chin points as needed.

Moho 12 introduced a new method called Switch Selection, which sounds good in theory. When you select is, a window opens and cycles through images from the Switch Layer as you scrub and creates keyframes.

A big problem I have with the new tool is that the artwork is displayed with bone deformations and transformations applied. This can sometimes makes it difficult to use the tool as intended because the image can bounce, rotate or even scale down too small in the window to be easily readable. I wish the panel just showed the artwork as it was originally drawn, without the animation and deformation applied to it (like the similar Drawing Substitution Window in Harmony.) At very least, displaying the art in Switch Selection with animation applied should be a user option. If I could disable that, I might then prefer this method.