Use Actions instead of switch layers for lip syncing

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Danimal
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Post by Danimal »

mkelley wrote:If you want an eye-opener, just watch "The Incredibles" and only look at the lip-sync. It's actually pretty horrible, but you would never notice it unless that's all you were concentrating on.
For decades lip sync was non-existant. Characters either had an open mouth or a closed one. No one ever complained about the hundreds of Disney, Warner Brothers, or Hanna Barbara cartoons that had zero lip sync.

I guess if your story and and images are so weak that you aren't paying attention to the plot and instead notice how well or smoothly the lips match up to the sounds then you deserve to be criticized.

"you appear to separate yourself as elite and sound quite condescending I might add"

No name calling in there, I totally and 100% agree :roll: :lol:
~Danimal
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Nucleus
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Post by Nucleus »

Danimal wrote:
mkelley wrote:If you want an eye-opener, just watch "The Incredibles" and only look at the lip-sync. It's actually pretty horrible, but you would never notice it unless that's all you were concentrating on.
For decades lip sync was non-existant. Characters either had an open mouth or a closed one. No one ever complained about the hundreds of Disney, Warner Brothers, or Hanna Barbara cartoons that had zero lip sync.

I guess if your story and and images are so weak that you aren't paying attention to the plot and instead notice how well or smoothly the lips match up to the sounds then you deserve to be criticized.

"you appear to separate yourself as elite and sound quite condescending I might add"

No name calling in there, I totally and 100% agree :roll: :lol:
OMG... what a terrible word to be called. LOL. don't you dare ever call me Elite. as far as condescending. it means you are frowning down at someone. "talking down" to which is what I got from the reply. calm down guy.
Last edited by Nucleus on Thu Nov 15, 2007 11:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Danimal
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Post by Danimal »

:roll: :roll:
~Danimal
tiffanysml
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Post by tiffanysml »

Thank you Ovjeh! I'll give it a try but I'm not very good so hopefully it'll turn out okay.


SlowTiger:
I definitely made it work with just switch layers...You see my character turns his head based on actions. While he turns from frontview, to let's say the profile view, those switch layers for his mouth become stiff and stay at that same original spot for the front view. So my only choice was to go to every switch layer and adjust the perspectives. Plus It was a hassle to move all of them through the different views. In my mind it seems like a lot more unnecessary work.



PS..and no...I'm still such a noob that I couldn't figure out how that 8 bone face set up was done. Thanks for listening to my zero cents.
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heyvern
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Post by heyvern »

Since all my characters now have bone based facial movements for head turns and phonemes using actions is my only choice for lip sync.

The script that reads in papagayo dat files to actions is great. Plus, without as much effort I can go in and tweak the bones of the copied actions to change the expressions for exaggeration or emotion. I might have just plain phonemes to create the lip sync "base" and then I can go in and add emotion to the existing key frames. The mouth positions are already there.

This was done using Papagayo and the dat action script. I created phoneme actions using only bones. After the initial lip sync is done I tweaked the motion. I use copies of the actions rather than references so I can tweak them afterwards.

http://www.lowrestv.com/character_rig/i ... place3.mov

-vern
tiffanysml
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Post by tiffanysml »

Professional choice of colors! Thanks for sharing! =D
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

My best example in defense of simple lip sync are The Muppets. Hey, they can just open and close their mouths, right? And look how lively they are! So how do they do it? It's definitely not the soft interpolation or the accuracy of the phonemes which delivers the emotion ...

Every animator should spend some time and play with a sock puppet, just to learn how much more important the body movements are: the tilting of the head, going back and forth with the head or the whole body, and so on.

I maybe could stand more standard anime series if it didn't just consist of absolutely stiff bodies and faces with a handful of mouth shapes scattered in time ...

On the other end of the scale there's something like the talking doorknob in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland". There are some drawings of it in "The Illusion of Life". Here we have a rectangular shape with just eyes and nose and mouth floating around, right? - Wrong. I urge everybody to get a copy of that movie and study just this doorknob, for fully animated dialogue, for subtlety of expression ...

And between those two extremes every animator has to find his personal way to deal with dialogue. Don't forget economical aspects. If there are only two lines of dialogue in your 5 minute film you can always afford to animate them as fully as possible. If you have to deliver 5 minutes crammed with dialogue in 4 weeks, you'll go for any automation and simplify as much as possible. And of course technical restrictions beat everything else - once you decided to go for bone rigged mouth movements and scripted li sync, your workflow becomes totally different from standard switch layer lipsync.
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