Maya interface, showing our Pre_Vis camera set up for Shot_23. Baby rabbit in the foreground with irate and provocative trolls in the background!
Yellow circles and arrows indicate timeline, and audio playback options in Maya....
I made a few tests of the lip sync, some worked better than others, but all seemed to be either slow, or not make much sense with the mouth shapes...
Katherine gave me a good tip....'record your mouth making the shapes' and copy that...
Surprisingly my mouth didn't make any of the shapes I thought it would...
This clip is just 23 frames long (we are working on 25 frames per second), so the clip zips past and it's difficult to distinguish the sounds.
I ended up with two basic shapes ('w' and 'oo'), and a final mouth pose that I hope looks defiant!
Here's a few notes I made about the process; that tie in with the image above....
Process to import sound....
Open scene number.
File >
Import audio >
Right click on timeline and select sound >
Select audio from sub menu >
Select playback time as 'real time' >
Select blend shapes (facial expressions and mouth shapes) and set them as key frames, in time with the audio track.
So that it's convincing, it's a good idea to key frame the mouth shape, a few frames before the sound emerges....
I then used the graph editor to snap the animation and remove any Maya smoothing....
Here's the lip sync clip! For shot_23
