Creating Talking Animations

 

One of the difficult parts of animation is to synchronise the lips with the vocal sounds so that we're creating talking animations that look believeable.

 

If you look at yourself in the mirror and speak a few paragraphs, you'll see that many of the lip movements are incredibly subtle and sometimes all the work is done by the tongue and so the lips don't move at all.

 

In sketchy cartoon style animations we can simply open and close the mouth in time with the sound and you get a believable result. But when you get into creating talking animations with 3d models then we really are attempting to recreate exactly what the human mouth actually does.

 

Poser is a great tool for doing this especially with the Mimic plug-in which allows you to add a soundtrack and let the software do a lot of the hard work in determining what shapes the character's mouth will make to speak the vocal sounds.

 

Creating talking animations is fun but pretty time intensive so prepare for some late nights!