I have been putting animated clips together for a couple of months now, and the one constant pain I’ve been having to deal with is connecting audio to a character’s mouth on their rig… often times I have to record sound clips for a single character and import them one by one… but what I’m having to do is create multiple “mouth elements” for each of my characters in order to lip sync to each individual track. Is this the only way to do it? I have tried to use the same rig mouth element for a character for all of my audio clips (for that character), however, the software doesn’t seem to allow this. Which really sucks because with each new mouth element (sometimes I have up to ten or more) for a single character, I have to recreate the mouth forms on each new mouth element. So instead of having the capacity to do all of the dialogue for a character on a single mouth element, I am relegated to having several mouth elements for a single character and then having to recreate the mouth forms for each one. Is there a way around having to do this?
Idealy I would like to have all dialogue for one character be on a single (mouth) element for that character’s rig.
Thanks
Well, not sure, if I understand everything correctly…?
Let’s create one character with one mouth-element, containing the 8 phoneme: a-b-c-d-e-f-g-x… (staying with the default names)… otherwise choose your own…
Either duplicate this character a few times, or import from your Library, or create your own, Studio will name all those mouth-elements individually - e.g. mouth - mouth1 - mouth2 - mouth3…etc… (or keeps the assigned name)…
In your Sound-Editor record and cut your sound-file for each of your characters and save…
Import those sound-files (as many as characters) into Studio…
or use Studios Sound Element Editor for importing and resizing soundfiles…
Move them into your start-position (Change Start Frame) and assign them individually to your characters (Modify Lip Sync Mapping)…
For more information, please check those links:
http://www.toonboomtutorials.com/2008/manual-lip-synch-toon-boom-tutorial/
http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=safari&rls=en&q=lip+syncing+in+Toon+Boom+Studio&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#
http://www.toonboom.com/products/toonBoomStudio/eLearning/tipsTricks/lipSynch/index.php
Cheers
Nolan
Thanks Nolan for the reply and the links: However, after looking at the tutorials, I’m still a little in the dark. Like I said, I have made several animated clips with characters speaking using the lip sync function. However (and this was a process of self learning) the way I was able to add dialogue to my characters mouths was to import a track of dialogue - create a mouth element which I attached to the “head” peg, then map the dialogue track to that mouth element… But this is where it gets confusing - I would then import another dialogue track for the same character, and then try to map it to the same “mouth” element I had previous used for the first dialogue track, and what the second dialogue track would do is copy right over the first one. So what I eventually had to do was create a new mouth element for every single dialogue track I would import for one character. Say I had 1500 frames… with two character talking to one another… and on separate audio software, I do the voices of both characters - which means I may often times have several audio tracks with dialogue that need to be imported into TBS. Well, as it stands now, I have to import each audio track one by one, create a brand new mouth element (often times I’ll have mouth 1, mouth 2, mouth 3, mouth 4, mouth 5… mouth 15) attached to a single characters “head peg”) for each of my dialogue tracks, then map each track to a specified mouth element. I’m sure this is not how it’s done, but it was the only way I could figure it out. Like I mentioned, at first I thought it was as easy as just mapping all of your dialogue tracks for a certain character to a single mouth element, but every time I would map a new track, it would just overwrite the previous one I had mapped.
I hope this better explains. What I’d like to know is how I can use a single mouth element for ALL my dialogue tracks for a single character, and not have them overwriting one another.
Thanks
G
Well, one can’t use one single mouth element for different soundtracks…
(they always will overwrite each other - that’s the way it should be)
You have to create one soundtrack with all your dialogues…
Cheers
Nolan
I would suggest working with shorter scenes.
You can then use your audio editing software to organise your dialogue tracks so that each character only has one dialogue track per scene.
Thanks gentlemen
G