Mouths - How many to make for a character?

[HOWLING_ABANDON]

Hi there!
I'm building my first character. Haven't been able to find much consistent information on this. If there a set standard for mouth phonemes?

How many phonemes should be made per character for lip syncing? What should they be labeled? Or does MoHo have a resource library I'm not aware of?




Thanks!

[slowtiger]

This totally depends on your style of animation. You can get away with just open / close like with muppets, or you can have dozens of shapes. Also you may need a different number of shapes for different angles of the head.

If you use an automatic lipsync program like Papagayo, you need to stick to its number and naming of phonemes.

[cgrotke]

If this is your first, try out the built-in lip sync that goes along with a Switch Layer. It's pretty simple, and is a bit more than Muppet open and close, but less than full lip sync. Then you can decide if you want less, more, or stick with this technique.

You'll need to put all your mouth laters inside the Switch Layer, and they should have the same number of points. I usually make one that is halfway open, then duplicate it and move the points around to make a few more open and a few more closed. About 5 mouths from open to close. I put the closed mouth at the bottom then increase the size for the next few layers until it is full open. I sometimes add a couple other mouths for specific sounds (oo or T usually) and throw them at the very top of the switch layer stack. That way I can use them while adjusting (see below)

Bring in your audio. Single character voice with no music or sound fx is best. Then make sure your switch layer settings are set to follow that audio track. (Layer Settings>Switch> Select audio sync source.) You can also let it interpolate sub-layers if you kept the number of points the same. This will allow the software to draw those in between mouths if you want the slightly smoother look.

The software will automatically guess which mouths to use and it does an OK job of guessing based on volume. But you aren't done...

Adjusting: Now go through and adjust those automatic-guesses. Sometimes there are more than needed and you can delete some. Sometimes it helps to slide them a bit to the left or right to better hit the accents. Sometimes you'll want a mouth that is more open than the guessed mouth, or you'll want to make sure it closed when there is no audio but the guess kept it slightly open.

I'd suggest a simple test project to try it out. Have your character speak a short sentence. See how it goes. My first test was pretty satisfying and speedy.

[Greenlaw]

As slowTiger said, it depends on your character design and the animation style you're going with.

Technically speaking, you can use as few as two or three shapes: open, close, and optionally the O shape. In some lower-budget TV animations you'll see this applied in 'throwaway' shots, and they may save animating with additional mouth shapes for more dramatic moments. Productions with a slightly better budget and more time may expand that to 4 to 8 shapes for dialog, and higher end productions will use 10 to 12 shapes.

I typically create 11 mouth shapes for dialog in my rigs, and these are...

Rest (or neutral)
A-I
E
O
U
C-D-G-K-N-R-S-Y-Z
W-Q
M-P-B
L
F-V
Th

Basically, I like to use what's regarded as the Preston Blair set, which is fairly traditional. A Google search will turn up more info about this.

Additionally, these 11 mouths shapes in my rigs have two modes, smile and frown, which are controlled using a Smart Bone Dial I call Emo.

After I animate the dialog, I'll apply additional scale transforms to the Switch layer itself, to smooth out the transition between mouth shapes.

Optionally, when I'm asked to create extra smooth lip sync, I may set up morphing mouth shapes using sublayer interpolation. This happens rarely though because it takes a lot more time to set up, and it's really not necessary most of the time.

These 11 shapes cover pretty much any dialog I need to animate, and I can do this with a wide range of expressiveness.

Beyond that, I may add special mouth shapes that are meant for expressions that are not specifically 'dialog' related. (Although these 'specials' might be used for broadly expressive dialog, for example, an extra large mouth for shouting.)

Sometimes I'll use fewer mouths shapes in a rig and it looks fine. For example, for the Sea Majors segment featured in the Fast & Furious Spy Racers episode Anchors Away (S5, Ep. 3), I only used a small handful of mouth shapes to animate multiple animal characters singing, and it looks totally fine. (You can see this animation on Netflix.)

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Tip: I try to get as much mileage out of the few shapes I include in my rigs.

The Emo SBD described above is one way to do this. With this control, I can create a lot of expressions using the same 11 drawings. (Assuming you created these in a vector layer, or have a mesh warp for deforming bitmap art.)

Another trick is to separate the tongue and teeth into their own layers. This way I can easily cheat 3 qtr views for the mouth by sliding the layers at different rates inside the head turn SBD.

[Greenlaw]

Here are some more tips for setting up and animating lip sync in Moho...

Use the Switch Selection Window to animate mouths. This is by far the easiest and most straight forward way to animate mouth shapes in Moho. This is also the best way to animate with sub-layer interpolation if you use this feature.

If you need to see all your mouth shapes at once, like when you're trying to align them or create a new mouth shape that aligns with existing ones, create an empty group layer above the Switch layer and drag all the mouths shapes to the group. All the mouths will be visible. When you're done, drag all the shapes back into the Switch. If you previous animated the Switch layer, don't worry, your keyframes will still be there and, so long as you didn't change the layer order of the mouth shapes, your dialog animation will still be in sync.

Speaking of layer order: Set up your mouth shapes from the bottom up, with new mouth shapes added at the top of the list. Why? Because the Switch Selection widow is sequenced this way.

Typically, my bottom most layer in the Switch layer is the Rest shape, followed by the shapes for dialog. Above those layers are the 'special' mouth shapes described earlier. To make this clearer to the animator, I'll color code the dialog mouth shape layers differently from the 'special' layers.

[MrMiracle77]

I typically set 11 mouth shapes for dialog in my rigs, and these are...

Rest (or neutral)
A-I
E
O
U
C-D-G-K-N-R-S-Y-Z
W-Q
M-P-B
L
F-V
Th

I use this set as well, but with an extra shape for 'R'. For expressions, consider adding smile, frown, grin, angry, and maybe a pursed look (with the corners pinched). The M-P-B set can double as a 'neutral' mouth position.

[sang820]

hi~
1- I used the Moho [Switch Layer] feature to animate the lips.
2-A, E, I, O, F, off these six mouth shapes are enough.
3- Take the hexagram as the base, and then fine-tune the nodes to accommodate more pronunciation details.

我的这个动画，就只有六个基础口型

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing: Remember that when you're using vector shapes for mouths or you have a mesh warp layer for bitmaps for mouths, you can change expressions to existing mouths easily. I especially like using the Magnet tool for this sort of thing. Just remember to create a key in the preceding frame before making the change so you don't affect other frames.

Also, you probably want to avoid using Bezier points for mouths if you intend to tweak the mouth shape a lot during animation. You can use Beizer but IMO it's more difficult to edit predictably for animation. I find it's much easier to simply use enough regular Moho points in the shape and just push them around with the Magnet. If you unintentionally created Bezier points, you can simply reset the curvatures to get back the regular points. After that, I suggest hiding Bezier Handles. (Also, download Synthsin75's Curvature Tool mod which adds Hide Bezier Handles to the Curvature Tool options.)

BTW, that's not a dis on Bezier Handles...I use this feature but I try to limit it to non-deforming items.