(Term 1: Week 9)

This week we learned about phonemes and how to animate a lip sync.

For this task, I’m back using the ‘Thepp’ character as I think the character has a fairly good facial rig that is easier to control. This is my first experience to animate a lip sync in Maya.

References

Below are some references from internet that I used most when doing the animation task.

Importing Audio

The next preparation is to import the audio file by dragging it to the timeline. And just like that the voice is available in the timeline and can be heard when scrubbing the timeline and during playback.

Maya support .WAV and .AIFF audio format on Windows. I started doing the file preparation on my Mac and tested several audio formats. I discovered that Maya on Mac support .MP3 and .M4A audio with no problem, but when I moved the working files to continue working on my Windows laptop, the audio files were not working & cannot be imported in Maya. So it will be best to just use .WAV format for both platforms compatibility especially when working with team with different machines.

Animation Process

The first thing I tried was to animate the mouth, jaw and lip at the same time at every intended time frame. But after several keyframes, I thought the process became quite tedious. Selecting and reposition each controllers, scrubbing the timeline and selecting each controllers again back and forth was not fun at all. And the result was quite bad.

After several failed attempt, I was thinking why not doing and finish the animation part by part like what I have learned in the previous assignments when animating character’s body. As Luke always mentioned during his lecture as well, to always animate and fix the hip motion first (main body) before moving to other body parts.

So going back to my case here, the ‘main body part’ for lip sync is the jaw. So I started animating the jaw first and then the lip, the tongue and the teeth. I can assure you that the animation process became so so much easier.

Below are the basic steps I took when doing the animation part by part:

Step 1: Animate the opening and closing motion of the jaw first.

–

Step 2: Animate the closing and opening motion of ‘O’ lip shape.

–

Step 3: Animate the teeth and tongue

–

Step 4: Animate the head / other part

In this task, I don’t use the Graph Editor much but just a very minor tweaks to smooth out some motions since I think the automatic curves animation turned out pretty good already.

The dialogue I chose above was not too fast, so I did a quick test with other audio with faster dialogue. I discovered that sometime you had to ignore some lip shapes if the character talk fast and chose to make shapes for the most prominent sound only. Too many drastic shape changes within 1 frame will make the lip motions look janky and not smooth.

Final Animation