My September Project (4) The Lipsync and curve editor.

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another Animation edition on HypefroActive. Well, this continues from where we left off creating animations for the month of September and is the fourth in the series. Ok, so i have left some little things undone to attend to them later because i couldn't resist the urge to animate something or at least anything as i took a long break from animation. So here we go, with me animating stuffs again.

I created a simple one minute or so script, got some beautiful people to voice it and was almost about perfect but i thought to include an intro. Something to introduce the Script and intended Animation. So, i created an intro of about eight hundred frames and will begin animating.

For me the biggest challenge i'll probably face is lip syncing. I hate lip syncing because it is boring and nothing really moves asides the lips. And if there was a way to avoid it this time around, trust me i would. But this same project is also about lip syncing and facial expressions amidst other little things i have in mind for it. However like any other project that involves lip syncing, it is

important to get the morph targets right because no matter how timely the lip sync is, if the morph targets do not fully interpret the mood to the audience then you wouldn't have achieved as much as you'ld hope to achieve. Well, lip syncing for me is annoying and the little grumpy sounds that sometimes add to the voice over just makes it a lot more annoying but that's what really adds spice to the voicing.

Ok, so reluctantly but compelled to do, here i am dragging shapes up and down to make the lips simulate the effect of speech. in all i have about eight targets for lip sync and the rest are just facial expression morph targets. Far from done, hey it's not as bad as i used to think it is, but i still hate it

though. So after a couple of slow progress and re-starts, i decided to bring in the oracle. Yeah, the oracle is "The Curve Editor". The curve editor doesn't only smoothens out animations only, it also is very good for monitoring wave forms for sounds to be lip synced. People, if you animate whatever it is that you animate and do not refer to the curve editor for further consultations, then you still are a long way to animating anything close as good. And like Jeff Lew said, The curve editor is your friend, use it and love it. And if you dont love it, well you gotta love it. And 3dsmax has two of em. The first is the standard one and can be found by default close to the far right of the tool bar. And the mini curve editor which is the other can be found above the frame buffer and at the same line and starts before the command line. Yeah, Again that's how you bring your sound in from external sources in your computer such as the desktop or any location it's been stored for use. Any of these two Oracles can be used and still produce the same results.

Well, at the top as you can already see is something i'll call a rough draft of where i'm going. So far everything has turned out well but then the magic has not even started. Just simple poses trying to tell a story and yeah, that's all i have for today. See you guys hopefully by next week and have a great day ahead.