LIP-SYNC - MOUTH MOVEMENTS

This post is an update on the lip-sync animation. 

I've added the mouth to my character, matching up relevant mouth shapes to the audio! As mentioned in my previous post, I already have my own preset mouth shapes, which I've used for my own animations. Over time, I've refined it to an easy to use state, where less is more and using a smaller group of mouth shapes looks better than many different mouth shapes.

For example, here's a gif from a video of mine from 2017, The Can. 

Every frame, a new mouth was drawn, leading to hundreds of different mouth shapes that, although they flow well, seem a little too organic in how they move into each other. The shapes and general style are fine, but their movements and the amount of shapes doesn't fit with the simpler, cartoony style of everything else.

Compare that to a gif from a 2018 animation, Nerdy and the Line.

In this gif, there's a lot of changes I made. Most notably, the limited number of mouth shapes being used. In total of 7 mouth shapes, 3 of which are just smaller versions of 3 other ones, with the 7th being a closed mouth. This is as a part of a "less is more" method I've been using; when I had mouth shapes for every possible phonic, it made lip-sync look a bit too weird and all over the place, with no cohesion. However, these shapes are similar to each other enough to look good when going from one shape to another.

Relating back to the TVPaint task, both the mouth in Nerdy and the Line and my lip-sync task are held in some kind of collection: for Nerdy it's in an Animate Symbol, and in the TVPaint lip-sync file it's in an Animbrush (again, mentioned in the previous post). I used the same mouth shapes in TVPaint as I did before, using this sheet of my mouth shapes as reference.

Using the Animbrush and a new animation layer, I went through and added mouths on top of my body and face roughs. I used my notes on the timeline as a guide, and matched them up with the relevant mouth shapes. For example, if the audio clip note requires an "A" sound, I would use the mouth shape with "A" assigned to it.

In the end, it came out looking like this!

The next step from here is cleaning up, starting with the chin. I have to make the chin move up and down as the character's mouth moves, something I've never done before. But if it goes well, hopefully it'll be a technique I can bring to my personal projects!