Smart bones and lip syncing
Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 3:59 pm
I'd like to share my satisfaction and frustration rigging a hed with smart bones.
What I need is a head that turns with a mouth that speaks. Every viseme must me available in any view. The character may be saying "A" while at the same time turns to left.
I started concerned with the head only. Create a bone that allowed it to turn right or left. Tested it. PERFECT!!!!
With just one bone, I could turn the head whatever direction like a dial.
Vey helpful.
Now mouth.
Firstly, I found that having the mouth inside a switch layer, inside the bone layer, didnt't work. Smart bones act only on cirect layers. So, it had no effect on each viseme under the switch layer, and result was that head turned bur mouth stayed in place.
After several trials I gave up and decided to have on sole mouth and create one bone for each viseme.
The idea was: the viseme bone creates the mouth position and the head turn bone turns it.
Sounded perfect until I started rigging it. The result was som many tweaking in-between that I almost gave up.
I finally managed to create the first bon/action/viseme. Mouth position was ok, and mouth/viseme followed head movements.
I then satrted with second viseme.
After two day of cray tweakings I finally found thar when I tweak one viseme, the previous viseme whch was working perfectly is now damaged and needs retweaking.
Imagine doing that for eleven mouth positions.
I got the feeling I'm getting dumb and not understanding the full working principles of smart bones, especially whe parts of the drawing have to respond to different actions at the same time.
Am I complicating it?
(sorry for my english)
What I need is a head that turns with a mouth that speaks. Every viseme must me available in any view. The character may be saying "A" while at the same time turns to left.
I started concerned with the head only. Create a bone that allowed it to turn right or left. Tested it. PERFECT!!!!
With just one bone, I could turn the head whatever direction like a dial.
Vey helpful.
Now mouth.
Firstly, I found that having the mouth inside a switch layer, inside the bone layer, didnt't work. Smart bones act only on cirect layers. So, it had no effect on each viseme under the switch layer, and result was that head turned bur mouth stayed in place.
After several trials I gave up and decided to have on sole mouth and create one bone for each viseme.
The idea was: the viseme bone creates the mouth position and the head turn bone turns it.
Sounded perfect until I started rigging it. The result was som many tweaking in-between that I almost gave up.
I finally managed to create the first bon/action/viseme. Mouth position was ok, and mouth/viseme followed head movements.
I then satrted with second viseme.
After two day of cray tweakings I finally found thar when I tweak one viseme, the previous viseme whch was working perfectly is now damaged and needs retweaking.
Imagine doing that for eleven mouth positions.
I got the feeling I'm getting dumb and not understanding the full working principles of smart bones, especially whe parts of the drawing have to respond to different actions at the same time.
Am I complicating it?
(sorry for my english)