Facial Anim_Lip Sync
In this lesson, I learned that lip sync is not only about matching the mouth to the audio. It is a step-by-step process: jaw opening, phonemes, and then polish.
First, I focus on the jaw. I need to find the accents in the sentence and open the jaw at the right time. The movement should not be linear, and it is better to favour the open pose. This helps the animation feel more natural.
Then I work on phonemes. I learned to animate sounds, not words. Different sounds have clear mouth shapes, like corners in for “oo” and corners out for “ee”. Lip shapes like “M”, “B”, and “P” need to be held for a few frames to read clearly.
Finally, in the polish stage, I add small details like tongue movement, subtle squash and stretch, and breathing. These details make the animation smoother and more believable.
Now I understand that good lip sync needs clear timing, simple shapes, and careful polishing.
Workshop: Overlap
When making this overlap animation, I first adjusted the movement on one axis direction. The tail movement leads the body, and I used a 2-frame delay to create the overlap effect.
For the tail animation, there are many controllers along the tail. To make the tail end feel softer, I adjusted the animation curves to create smoother motion. Because the tail has many controllers, I could also group them and adjust the curves together. This helped me create different types of movement and control the softness more easily.
Through this process, I understood that overlap animation depends a lot on timing, delay, and curve adjustment.