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animating phoneme morph targets

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Claude:
Love it. Great work.
Suggestion: please limit the head rotation, so that
we don't lose sight of the lips and the eyes.

exile:
Thanks to both Johnar and Claude. The rotation (meant to go with "modeled my head") does take away from the hard work of lip synchronizing - the turnaround should happen at a time when he is not speaking, or just be limited - the easiest option. Great to have an exercise taken seriously - that's encouraging for a novice.

I'd like to learn to model a better head, no interest in photorealistic characters, just cartoon figures and marionette-style puppets. It's great to have this forum to ask questions. The responses are incredibly fast.

johnar:
 Well done exile.

Edit: Something i found when lipsyncing was to do that part first, and animate the character after you've finished the lipsync.
Eyes can be done during, or after, animation, as moving the character will determine where the eyes will be looking, but the timing of the voice wav file doesn't change, so it's easier to do the mouthwork when the character is not moving.

exile:
Johnar, that’s how I did it, or tried to. So the lips are still moving during that stupid head rotation, which I will correct. I’m a long ways from mastering lip sync, the visual sound wave helps, but there’s also anticipation - mouths move before sounds are formed. Length of sound isn’t easy either, I was still unsure after different tries. A character without teeth doesn't have a convincing f. But I liked these results a lot better than with automatic lip sync with Papagayo in 2D programs.
There are two things I really appreciate about the phoneme morph editor: 1) it doesn’t seem to matter if the next sound comes before the fade of the last one is finished - by default, it looks like you would need five frames minimum before inserting another phoneme or you would have to manually replace fade out and fade in. That doesn’t seem to be necessary. 2) I went back to the object editor, deleted and reprogrammed a phoneme under the same name. The scene editor accepted the change and the key frames with that phoneme were still active and worked with the new shape. No extra work.
I don’t know if this is right, but it seems like my slightly dopey open-mouthed default position was a  lucky accident, because the transitions are smoother and it covers up slightly inexact timing. The neutral, or closed-mouth position was a morph and not the default zero in the phoneme editor.
Edit: Adding 2nd try here, the rotation was put at the end. Don't know if the head movements are too exaggerated now. It was impossible to delete the head rotation keyframes alone, I had to redo everything past those actions. The software "remembered" too much. Even converting the last frame before and the first frame after into corner frames did not prevent it. Fortunately only orientation was affected.

johnar:
I agree the phoneme editor works very well. And behaves really well during copying, pasting and editing already existing phoneme keys


Default mouth shape is best open, for exactly the reasons you gave.
--- Quote ---the transitions are smoother and it covers up slightly inexact timing
--- End quote ---
(maybe not quite as open as peters tho)


 I had a character with no teeth, and needed them for 'f, and s and other 'teethy' mouth shapes, so i made some teeth seperately, (new object), and added them to one of the figures headbones. (one that didn't move).
 Then added morph targets to new teeth. Teeth Morphs were 'top up, bottom down, top out and bottom out.
 As you will know, morph targets work both ways. Ie: open mouth morph can be used as closed mouth by going into negative values. Doesn't always suffice, but does more often than not.
 So positive values raised teeth in 'top teeth up morph', and negative values lowered the top teeth. (kept things 'simpler')
 Top teeth out was handy for 'F', because the teeth needed to poke out a bit to cover bottom lip. (a mixture of topteeth down and topteeth out)
 It meant some extra morphing in scene mode, having to animate teeth seperately from mouth, but saved me losing all the existing morph targets i'd made, if i'd added teeth to the actual head object.
 A tongue can also be added later in the same way. A seperate object added to the figure, and with it's own morphs, tongue up etc. I found 'tongue up worked best with just the front half of the tongue curling up. Then i had a morph target called 'tongue lift, which moved the whole tongue up and down.
 Theres so much can be done with morph targets.
  PeterTalking head is looking, and sounding, really good, and the more you keep at it, the better will be the results.
 Good one exile, keep up the good work.

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