Mouth animation

Retired Products Animate General Discussion
1

I have been going through all the tutorials for a few days now and kind of feel overwhelmed. I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction for what I need to do.

I need to create a scene like a room. There are atleast 5 different objects in the room. They are talking to each other. Since this is my first animation I want to keep things simple. The objects would not move around or have any limbs.

I just want to put mouths on the characters. The mouths would be different ofcourse.

The objects (characters) are going to be facing each other or something like that. The objects are also going to vary in size and angle. This means that the mouths are going to be in different shapes and angles (orientation).

I want to record the audio and do auto lip sync. This would mean that I would need to create various mouth shapes and create a mouth chart (hopefully I am right).

I would not have eyes since this is the first animation.

The scenes / camera views would be:

  1. Zoomed out view of the whole room where we can see all the objects
  2. Zoomed in view of each object/character when they are talking.
  3. Slightly zoomed out view of 2 or 3 objects when they are talking to each other.

I need to be alternating between these views in the animation/video.

I wish I had the time (when I come back from my full time job) to learn everything and start experimenting. But unfortunately I don’t. Could you please point me to the right tutorials just needed to be able to do the above and get the animation out there as soon as possible.

If anyone could point out the right steps or sequence needed (just outline) to do the above animation it would be great for me to look into them in more detail (using the resources available here) to do the animation.

2

Could I get an answer to this please?

3

Well, for someone who is just starting out the scene you propose to do is anything but “simple.” My suggestion is to start out with one character and no camera moves. After you’ve mastered that, add another and so on. It is difficult enough to animate a single character but when you have more characters, even if they don’t have limbs, interacting with each other and taking turns speaking the work and complexity multiplies.

If you really want to do the scene as you propose I would do the following:

  1. Create a background image for the scene.
  2. Create individual drawings for each character, attach a Peg to each character and Group with a Composite. Then add mouth shapes for A-X.
  3. Place all characters in their respective positions on the background scene.
  4. Record the audio either each voice separately or all together. Then, separate each voice track so that the auto lip sync is done one character at a time.
  5. Do the auto lip sync.
  6. Add a Camera with a Peg and set keyframes for the various positions you mentioned.
4

I already have sketches for each characters ready in photoshop. Just need to add finishing touches.

" attach a Peg to each character and Group with a Composite"

What exactly is the purpose of these two steps? Could you explain this a little more?

5

A Peg for controlling the entire character and, if you create a Group Selection With Composite (Ctrl+Shift+G), it puts everything for that character into one tidy little group with its own Composite. Usually there is the body, head, mouth, eyes, arms, legs, hands, etc., all the parts of a character, contained in this one Group which makes it much more manageable for single or especially mutltiple characters as you propose.

6

Thanks for your answers