Best smart bone practice for mouth shapes?

[djwaterman]

Long title, but yes, when creating mouth shapes with smart bones, I have already run into the problem of having two different morph shapes on a smart bone, because you have to go back through to the base shape as you push the bone over to the other side.

My thinking is, is it better to just have a single mouth shape per smart bone, example, not a one for open and closed, but just open, or closed?

What have other animators using smart bones found to be the best and most economical process for creating these shapes, and really, how many are actually needed?

[neeters_guy]

It's rather cool that with smart bones lip sync can be done similarly to how it's done in 3D. There's an idea (popularized by the book Stop Staring By Jason Osipa) where most lip sync shapes can be articulated by a combination of open-close and narrow-wide shapes. With these two you can hit most phonemes:

open/narrow -- O, U, WQ
open/wide -- AI, E (possibly L, FV, etc.)
close/wide -- MBP, rest

If you want a better read on L, FV, etc. then I would add smart bones to move the tongue and teeth as appropriate:
tongue -- L
teeth -- FV, etc.

That's basically what I did in my last 11 Second Club entry.

The tricky thing about open-close and wide-narrow actions is to make sure you start with a good default position, and not move points horizontally in the open-close action nor vertically in the wide-narrow action.

Anyway, that's my take on it so far.