Hi
I am having a lot of problems trying to use the lip sync program in TBS 3.0.
(After importing sound, and then right-clicked on a cel of the Xsheet’s sound column to “Show Lip Synch,” then created 8 mouth drawings in the mouth colum.)
However, Whene I right- click on the sound columns header → Modify Lip Synch Mapping, ALL THE DRAWINGS IN THE MOUTH COLUMN DISAPPEAR
At the bottom of each cell, it’s listed as: mouth-A, mouth-B, mouth-C but the drawings themselves are gone.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
It’s because you don’t the change the default mapping options and your drawings are not named a, b, c, etc.
In the Edit Mapping window, you have to associated or “Map” each shapes (A-B-C-D-E-F-G-X) to your drawing element (at the top there is a combo box) and your cell names (fill the InputTextBox).
By default the cells and named by the frame number. So if you didn’t rename all your cells of you mouth element, in the mapping window you should enter:
1 in the Input Text Box for the A shape
2 in the Input Text Box for the B shape
etc … until X.
Note that in the exposure sheet, if you see a cell named “mouth-1” the name is only 1 since TBS add the name of the element in front of the name of the cell (so the element name is mouth and the cell name is 1. it makes “mouth-1”). Enter just “1” in the mapping.
Hope it helps!
I’ve been working a bit with lip sync. The thing I’ve noticed is most of the lip sync tables, drawings,examples I’ve seen use 9 sync positions not the 7 TBS uses. The reason I was looking into lip sync is I’ve noticed my TBS animations don’t look right using the default mouth positions suggested by TBS.
I’d like to suggest in the next version of TBS use the 9 frame positions and use the ones like I’ve seen in the animation books and on-line.
Hi iJavaJoe,
The automated lip-synch engine is not suppose to give you the perfect results for your animation. To create quality animation it will do 80% of the work for you then depending on the expression of the character, the way it speaks etc you would have to fine tune your mouth movements.
You know you can draw any amount of lip shapes for you to replace the original 7 lips positions. Say you can have a mouth element with 20 different cells (one mouth position in each cell) have the first seven one for automated lip-synching and keep the other non standard shapes to fine tune your animation. Then you can use the cell tab or the exposure sheet to change the lip position to whatever you want.
Can you send me a link or reference of the 9 shapes you are talking about.
Thanks,
Mathieu,
You may also want to look at the lip sync tool you get with “Moho”, called “Papagayo”. I tried it last night and within about 10 minutes had a Beautifully matched lip sync. It to used the 9 phonemes. It takes a few minutes to adjust the words to the sound but the results are Great. Also it has 3 different angles for the lip sync, straight on, to one side and a human version (don’t really like the human version, yuck). Please build that into TBS…
Hi JavaJoe,
Thanks for the link. I think converting our lipsynch engine to a 9 shapes engine will require a lot of effort. I know about papagayo but this tool is not the same as the Toon Boom Studio lipsynch engine.
Papagayo use dictionary words to breakdown the phonemes. You have to write down the text and then position the words in time to match the lip synchronisation manualy. Toon Boom Studio lip synch engine will analyse the sound and map the mouth shapes in time for you whatever language or sound you are making. It’s using a unique formula to transform sounds (not words) into lip shapes.
If I calculate the extra work that you have to do with Papagayo, I don’t think it’s faster to use Papagayo then TBS to achieve the same results. In both software you have to fine tune your lipsynching anyways.
That said, Papagayo is released under the GPL licensing. What could be done is creating a command to import the dat file that Papagayo generates (Papagayo will only output a dat (plain text) file format to import in Moho or other animation software).
I will seriously evaluate this possibilities.
Thanks,