Week8: Phoneme animation

Introduction

This week Luke talked about how to do lip sync animation. This is usually done at the end in animating, which can add a lot of charm to the character.

TIPS:

1. Keep graph on linear
2. Make sure to hit the accents
3. Don’t have to animate every syllable
4. Work your way down from Big Accents
5. OFFSET you mouth shapes back by 2 Frames Once Done
6. Hold closed mouth shapes for at least 2 frames
7. Don’t always follow your facial references

PROBLEM:

1. Too many controllers, always choose the wrong control points.
2. I don’t know how to adjust the animation of the nose. Rotating the nose in this model feels no change.
3. I don’t know how to spline and polish this kind of animation.

Process

First of all, I watched a lot of videos first and found the most suitable one to refer to how I should do phoneme animation. I think that a good phoneme animation should not only express interesting facial features, but also the position of some facial muscles should become more like animation.

For example, the mouth is the same as a bouncing ball. When you squeeze the mouth, its two sides should be stretched to ensure the same volume. In the same way, the movement of the chin and the cheeks constitute the volume of the head.

After watching the video, I chose a recording and started to perform by myself. This sentence is: “Oh~yeah~Everything is fine.” I try to make my mouth shape and expression more exaggerated, and also match the head movement. This makes me look more like an animated character.

Next I started to create the scene, this time I chose cowboy as my character. First, I fixed the camera and set the cowboy’s head movement.

Then I follow the principle of squeezing and stretching, moving the muscles and facial features of the head, as shown in Figure 1 when inhaling, and Figure 2 when relaxing.

I did not forget to add the movement of the teeth and the movement of the tongue.

But here I encountered a difficulty. Everything is in the audio is very fast, and it is difficult for me to capture my lip movements when checking my reference. But if you don’t change the key frame of this words, it will feel that the character has lost this part of the words. After thinking about it, I decided to add the lip controller, but not the other controllers.

Looks much better now!

But I can’t forget to use spline and polish in the curve editor, but the trouble is that I don’t know how to polish the animation. What seems to be said in the video is to add more frames to adjust. He even used blend shape to get wrinkles, but because I didn’t know how to change the model, I gave up.

Finally output my work.

Conclusion

Because this is just a lip job, I didn’t do other animations. In this assignment, I found that the principle of animation is still very important. In order to make a more cartoonish change, I need to exaggerate the character’s movements as much as possible. This is an interesting exercise. By the way, this character looks like Kurt.