Anim8or Community

Johnar this is a very good post, thank you. Also, Papagayo is a lip-syncing free program designed to help you line up  phonemes (mouth shapes) with the actual
recorded sound of actors speaking. Papagayo makes it easy to lip sync animated characters by making the process very simple.
This software is very useful creating and plotting out the voice overs for your anim8or
movies.You will need to develop storyboards in order to get successful    synchronizations.

 
         
         
           
         

 Firstly thank you Steve for the new sound builds, the second sound build
 proved to be very interesting. My test character had 4 phoneme mouth morph
targets  and I recorded my voice with audacity free software, I then added
the sound track. Then from the drop down edit menu, I selected  edit phoneme track and I selected my test character head. I then played my
sound track in the scene editor and paused it at the time frame I wanted the
mouth to move. At this point I clicked in the phoneme track and selected the
mouth shape to match the sound, in this case it an “O” sound. See picture 1.
Anim8or produces a default value of 1 (which you can change) it also develops a default value of 0 on the key frames before and after your selected frame. This is very good and helps to save time, see picture 2.
 Can we play the sound track at a slower speed? It was difficult to select the exact area of the sound wave because it played at normal speed, which proved to be very tricky.

Love your work johnar, and great to see I'm not the only one who regularly falls back on good old pen and paper!  I admit that I am yet to tackle lip syncing, it's one of those "one of these days" things, but I know who to hit up for advice when I do

Thank you steve. Thank you heaps. That means a lot to me.


thecolclough

if i might offer a spot of constructive criticism

 Yes Please!!
  Well spotted with the top teeth. I thought i was getting away with that.
 
 A while back, his top teeth were annoying me in some particular mouth shapes, ('FFF' was the main one) so i added a morph target to lift or lower them, just to tweak things when polishing in scene mode. I did the same with the bottom teeth, you can see the morphs in the left side of the pic of the time track. ('topteethup' and 'bottomteethup' ) ('down' is just a negative value of up.)

 But now that you've pulled me up on those top teeth, you're absolutely right, and 'hopefully' you'll notice, in the future, that i've taken your advice on board.

 thanks.   

dode1 keep at it with those morph targets. Once you get comfortable with them, it's amazing the 'scope' of what can be done with them.

lots of good work there, johnar.  i completely agree that phoneme identification is hard work, and i must admit i haven't made a serious attempt at it myself in years ...although i might have another stab at it now that steve's given us a shiny new tool for it!

if i might offer a spot of constructive criticism: one thing i've noticed from watching your character on a loop is that his top teeth are moving relative to his skull.  makes sense for the bottom teeth to do that, of course, but not so much the top ones, so it might be worth disconnecting those from the flexible mouth element and rigging them separately so they stay static.

dode1, no, the .gif format doesn't support audio.

I am probably stupid, but is there sound with these animated gifs? I like gifs too, but are we incorporating sound with these morphs or what? I saw the video with sound and that is great! I made my first morphs today following helpful posts here and on Youtube.

Spectacular! And you have some good advice for lip-syncing, johnar.

A test of an energy canon with sound effects.

Hi again,

 I've spent the last wee while, torn on where i should post this. Here, or in the Lipsync tool thread.

 Because of the current work being done on an8 lipsync tool, and because of the pics and short vid which i've made with 'anim8or lip sync' in mind, i've decided to post it here, rather than clog up the lipsync tool thread with, essentially, only my way of doing lip syncing
 But by posting here, i'm also hoping it may still be helpfull, somehow, in the building of the an8 lip sync tool, and the syncronization of it into a simple workflow of lip syncing in Anim8or.

 First off, here's the example video. (it repeats to show mouth shapes)


 So, step 1 is identifying which phoneme goes on which frame of the timetrack.

 This is probably the hardest and most important thing i've found with lip syncing, so steve, theres plenty of crucial work there, and am looking forward to that journey with you.
 
Up until 'sound and lipsync' coming to anim8or, i've used a trial version of 'magpie pro'. The full version has plenty of bells and whistles, but all u need is a picure of the .wav file with corresponding frame numbers, Magpie trial has a 'select and zoom' function, and 'arrow key scrubbing'. These help tremendously in locating the right frame with the right sound.
 I'm old school, so i record the frames like this:


 With this info we're good to go.
 
 You'll notice by the numbers in the pic above, that normal speed speech doesn't have a lot of spare frames in a word. In fact, there's often only 2 frames between 1 phoneme and the next. This makes  'Overlapping phonemes where one is transitioning into the other' quite a critical part of getting realistic lip syncl.

 Heres the time track with keys set for "family of thieves"

 The keying itself is actually quite simple, the trick to realism is being able to use the graph editor to adjust the strength of the keys.
 Another important trick is to allow a mimimum of 1 empty frame between each phoneme key, to avoid 'popping', which really doesn't look good, and wants to be avoided if you want your lipsyncing to look ok.

 And heres a gif of the results (because i love making animated .gifs)

 "Family of Thieves"
 I'll contiue posting progress of this new 11 second clip as i get through it, and welcome any feedback
 Ideas of anim8ors new sound and lipsyncing should be placed in the appropriate threads please.

 Thanks.   

 Audio courtesy of 11secondclub.com   Thank you

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