Week 19: Lip-Syncing – Spline Animation

Introduction

This week, I worked on changing my lip-sync animation from stepped to spline and replacing the placeholder elements.

In order to start working on the lip-syncing animation, I was advised to attach a camera to the face.

I used a parent constraint to attach the camera to the forehead controller.

This was extremely useful, as I have already animated the key poses of the character.

Apart from the facial reference video that I had recorded, I also used a mirror to help me animate the mouth.

I had to hear the audio over and over again whilst repeating the sentence out loud. This helped me understand which parts of the lips were moving.

Before working on my facial animation, I only focused on the body.

I changed the keys from stepped to spline in the graph editor and then cleaned up the animation curves.

I started creating different mouth movements based on the phonemes.

I used Studio Library to help me create the poses for each phoneme.

This saved me a lot of time as many of the sounds appeared more than one time during the audio.

For my intro scene, I initially wanted that the character was mad at his computer because his rendering process had failed.

However, I reconsidered my decision as I felt that my character was too old for that situation.

For this reason, I adapted it into the blue screen of death in Windows 10.