Fiziwig's Animator Studio Tutorials

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

This is a continuation of building the character started with this tutorial.

To be perfectly honest, I've been dreading this part of the process. Lip synching a character's mouth to the recorded dialog just sounded like it would be very complicated. I'm happy to report that this is about the easiest thing I've learned so far in Anime Studio.

It all starts with downloading the free lip synch software called Papagayo. The instructions and tutorial are excellent, so I won't bother duplicating the explanation here. To sum up, you load in your recorded dialog, type in the words of the dialog, and then use Papagayo to line up the words with the recorded sound file. Then simply export the dialog as a DAT file. What to with that DAT file is what I'll cover here.

Famed classic animator Preston Blair, who's work you've seen in everything ranging from Fantasia, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Mickey Mouse, and Droopy the Dog, to the Flintstones, developed a system of animation lip synching based on ten standardized mouth shapes called the Preston Blair Phoneme Series. It consists of nine mouth shapes for various sounds and a tenth shape for the resting position between words. Animating a lip synch in Anime Studio is as simple as drawing those ten shapes in a switch layer, and letting Papagayo work its magic.

Here is an example of what the ten mouth shapes might look like.

I used the PNG image above, imported into a temporary reference layer, to draw the mouths for Egg Man. Note that you must name the mouth layers inside the switch layer exactly as shown in the reference image, including observing upper case and lower case conventions. Since I want to use interpolation in the switch layer, so that the mouth smoothly morphs between mouth shapes, I started by tracing the AI layer. All the other layers were created by copy/pasting the AI layer into the new layer and, with Auto-Weld turned off pushing the points around to match the shape of each image. For shapes where the teeth or tongue are not visible, just push them up to the outlines, and they will be hidden from view.

Next, I added another bone rig to move the mouth when the head is turned, and gave it a scale control value of -2.5. Here's what the bone rig looks like.

I tried rendering the animation as a flash file, but the results were disappointing. Flash, it seems, does not smoothly interpolate between the switched mouth positions. Here is what the animation looks like with a line from my upcoming Adventures of Sticky and the Egg Man.