Datasheet

Learning the Basics of Lip Sync
Chapter 1
In modeling for facial animation, mix and match is the name of the game.
Instead of building individual specialized shapes for every phoneme and expression,
like for an F or a T, we’ll build shapes that are broader in their application, like wide or
narrow, and use combinations of them to create all those other specialized shapes. On
the animation front, it’s all about efficiency. You want to spend your time being creative
and animating, not fighting with the complexities that often emerge from having a face
with great range. It doesn’t sound like there’s much to these concepts for modeling and
animating, and, yeah, they really are small and simple—but they’re huge in their details,
so let’s get into them.
Before we can jump into re-creating the things we see and understand on faces, we
need to first identify those things we see and understand. Starting on the ground floor,
this chapter breaks down the essentials of lip sync. Next, we’ll go into how basic speech
can be broken into two basic cycles of movement, which is what makes the sync portion
of this book so simple. Finally, at the end of this chapter, we’ll take those two things—
what’s essential and the two cycles—and build them into a technique for animating.
The bare-bones essentials of lip sync
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The two speech cycles
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Starting with what’s most important: visemes
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Building the simplest sync
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