Introduction
This week we are getting familiar with lip syncing animations and in order to animate our face rig, we have to add several facial expressions.
For my lip syncing animation, I decided to use as a reference part of a conversation held by Hans Landa from the movie Inglorious Basterds.
Part 1: Character Rigging
In order to create a lip-syncing animation of Christoph Waltz, first I wanted to customize my face rig.
I used some reference pictures (front and side view) of the actor in order to analyze the shape of his face.
The shapes of his face that caught my attention were:
- Plane Face (forehead and chin are aligned).
- Straight & Sloped Forehead
- Cleft Chin
- Wrinkles around his mouth
- Puffy eyes
Even though I am aware that my rig doesn’t entirely resemble the actor, I can say that I used many of his facial features as a reference in order to customize my rig.
Part 2: Lip-Syncing
In order to start my lip-syncing animation, I had to first import the video and audio into my Maya file.
I used Adobe Premiere Pro to export the video into frames (.jpg sequence) and also the audio (.wav).
After importing the video and audio into my file, for this week we had to animate our character rig like a puppet.
In order words, we needed to analyze the audio waveform in order to determine when our rig was opening and closing its mouth.
Part 3: Work in Progress
In order to create a more realistic lip-syncing animation, I am going to add over the upcoming weeks more facial expressions.
Not only does the mouth move when the character is talking, but also the eyebrows, cheeks and forehead.
For this reason, I am going to analyze what types of expressions I need to add in the Blend Shapes panel in order to improve the animation.