Moho Forum

I'm in the process of building a character designed to do video blogging. I was testing only phonemes so nothing else was animated. The character is still pretty rough but I wanted to share the test with the MOHO community. I was not satisfied with any of the available phoneme choices in the Preston Blair set when the character was supposed to say "SD" so I left it blank. I'm going to create additional phonemes for "sh", "ch" and "th".
I think I'm looking at several more weeks of work before I can post a video for the public. This one is unlisted.

Looking good.

Like you, I made an alternate set of phonemes and it includes two versions of "e." Both are the widest of the mouth shapes, but one is wider than the other. Myself, I might animate "SD" as short-e followed by wide-e. But it depends on how it looks.

Hoptoad wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 12:02 pm Like you, I made an alternate set of phonemes and it includes two versions of "e." Both are the widest of the mouth shapes, but one is wider than the other. Myself, I might animate "SD" as short-e followed by wide-e. But it depends on how it looks.

Whew! I'm actually glad to hear that. Thanks. It felt like I was 'breaking the rules' by modifying the Preston Blair phoneme set. Even worse than that is I feel like an oddball because I'm working on what I call an 'animated video blogger'. I have the perfect face for radio!
I'm thinking about adding a couple of mouth expressions to the phoneme switch layer.
When it's ready I'll just rename the files as 'episode'1,2 etc.

I worried that I was making lip sync more difficult, because of how many new phonemes I had added.

Doing lip sync with my custom set was slow, but only at first. After a while, I got much faster, thank goodness.

Will your "animated video blogger" do all the lip sync automatically? That's what it sounds like you mean. How does something like that work? Do you have to type-in the text?

Hoptoad wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 3:21 pm Doing lip sync with my custom set was slow, but only at first. After a while, I got much faster, thank goodness.

Will your "animated video blogger" do all the lip sync automatically? That's what it sounds like you mean. How does something like that work? Do you have to type-in the text?

I prefer manual lip sync even though it's a lot of work. At the moment I write text over a screenshot of the audio wave and draw arrows. (If anybody has any tips I certainly would appreciate hearing them.)
To ease the load I think I'll also add scenes where I just talk in the background.
My plan is to complete an episode, post it and then save the document. Then I will delete all animation from the document and rename it to start a new episode.
I'm also hoping that I will be able to improve the animation quality of the character as time goes on.

3deeguy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:07 pm I prefer manual lip sync even though it's a lot of work.

Me, too.

3deeguy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:07 pm My plan is to complete an episode, post it and then save the document. Then I will delete all animation from the document and rename it to start a new episode.
I'm also hoping that I will be able to improve the animation quality of the character as time goes on.

I do something like that, sort of.
I don't delete anything and re-start. Instead, for a new scene I will create a New File, and then choose IMPORT Moho Object, and import the basic character, which is fully rigged. The basic character doesn't have any animation, but it has all the phonemes ready to go, as well as actions (for example, "blink").

3deeguy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:07 pm I don't delete anything and re-start. Instead, for a new scene I will create a New File, and then choose IMPORT Moho Object, and import the basic character, which is fully rigged. The basic character doesn't have any animation, but it has all the phonemes ready to go, as well as actions (for example, "blink").

You just made me think of something I hadn't thought about. Not only do I 'not' want to lose all that work I put into rigging a character...I want to keep the blinks, eye, eyelid, eyebrow 'and' body movements.
I've learned some very important things from this dialogue. Thanks.

Happy to help. I get a lot of information from this forum, so once in a while I try to give some back.

Nice work.

Like Hoptoad said, lip syncing does get easier. This is my current progress. I made my own phoneme chart based on Preston Blair by taking photos of my own mouth and adding 'Ch', 'Th' and 'S' to the chart.