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Keyframing mouth movements
This seems like a basic question to me, but it’s hard to search out a direct answer. I’m trying to find out what kinds of animating I can do in AE. I understand the process of keyframing a layer’s position, rotation, scale and opacity, but can you cycle through different “symbols” such as you can in Flash?
I like the idea of setting up a character to move the body as separate layers with puppet pins, but I’m used to swapping out mouths for lip syncing and eyes for blinking. I don’t see a means for this in AE yet. Can it have several different mouth images on different layers that only appear on certain keyframes one at a time? I’d feel limited with the “ventriloquist dummy” style mouth you get from just animating upper and lower lip layers. Even bending them with puppet pins isn’t the same as having a ready to use mouth in every position you can use for each “f” or “p” sound and so on.
It seems I could animate the character in AE with a blank face, then pass it over to flash to animate the
eyes and mouth if need be, but that seems a bit messy.This is my first time trying AE, so I’m just getting familiar with it’s animation potential.
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6 Replies
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Do you want AE to interpolate between the frames our simply switch from one frame to another. For the latter, check out Aharon’s tutorial section. For the former, there are a variety of ways to do this depending on the shot. For a static face, you may try using the liquid effect and setting several keyframes outside you animation. Then simply copy the keyframes to the proper place. AE will interpolate between the frames. Also, you can keyframe percentages between the neutral position and the new keyframed so that each sound doesn’t look exactly the same. One could be at 100 percent, with another at 80 percent.
Hope this helps
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Thanks. That tells me I should be able to do what I’m looking to. My question was more about switching from one frame to another, like a set of phenome mouths that could be set to the sound. I’ve done plenty of it in Flash, but at first glance (and even after going through many Lynda.com tutorials-I do try to find the answers myself first) I couldn’t tell If AE’s animation abilities included swapping out elements like Flash swaps out symbols. It appears there’s a few ways to do it at that.
I’ve tried using puppet pins a little and really like the idea of animating movements this way, and I’ll want to try animating a “puppet mouth”, but I’m going to want to go with the format I’m used to for lip
sync a lot.Sometimes I just need to find out a basic thing like this, but finding any reference to it is dependent on knowing where it’s mentioned. It’s looks like my next question is going to be what image size is best to work with in Photoshop for bringing into After Effects, and the best way to bring Flash symbols into AE.
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As for your first new question, the answer is dependant on the resolution of your final output and the size of your element. For example, if your are outputing 720p, then a full sized element should be about 1280 x 720. If you plan on doing a bunch of zooming in, size your element so that at the closest zoom, you have a large enough element so as to avoid artifacts and pixelation. As for your other question, I am not the one to ask as I rarely use flash, and by that I mean I have openeded it 2x in my life.
Hope this helps
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Thanks again. That’s pretty much what I was heading towards after a bit more experimenting yesterday. I had been trying to export some symbols out of Flash to create Photoshop versions, but I was very dissapointed in the results. As vectors in Flash, they looked perfect. No matter how outrageously big I made the exported image (600 dpi in the end), it looked terrible in Photoshop. All fine black lines replaced by extremely stairstepped, chunky pixels.
Later on I tried just creating a new Photoshop document at 1920 X 1080 at 72 dpi, and tested drawing directly in it. Much better resolution at this size, but it still seems that I can’t export the clean vectors to look as good as they could in this environment. I’m trying to avoid having to hand trace them all to get them into a proper file size. That’s why I wondered If Flash symbols could be taken straight into AE.
All this won’t matter as much as far as new projects, I’ll start them out correctly and shouldn’t run into this. But I’d like to use
assets I already created, and it seems strange that I need to recreate something that appears perfectly sharp on my screen but retains far too little of it’s sharpness when exported out. -
Lip Synch:
What many people do is create a composition with a different phoneme on each frame.
Take this comp into the main comp where you need to do lip synch.
Enable Time Remapping. Using hold keyframes, scrub to whichever frame has the phoneme you need.
The nice thing about this method is all of your mouth positions are in one comp and you can still apply effects, puppet pins, etc. on top of that nested comp.
Here is a tutorial.Flash import:
AE can import SWF files and recognize their alpha channels.
If you turn on “continually rasterize” (the starburst icon), they maintain vector quality and scalability. -
This seems similar to the tutorial here I looked at last night, and seems like a good workable approach. There’s one part I’m not getting yet. He shows you the 8 different mouths as being laid out one after another in the timeline, and those frames are referenced each time that mouth is needed, that part I get, but where are those 8 frames located? At the beginning of the clip like a “lead in”, or is it a composition embedded within to use as a source, but not made visible as an element in the final composition?
I may just need to watch it again.It almost resembles Flash’s setup of having a library of symbols that can be called up for any individual frame that uses one, or left on the timeline until swapped for another.
However the finer points are, at least it looks like there’s a way to do it. For a moment I started to think the only forms of animation AE could do was moving around and distorting the images on the layers at keyframe intervals. I could certainly see a reason for limiting the ability to run through many different frames when it comes to using bitmaps from Photoshop. It must get memory intensive, where having single upper and lower lip layers and just moving them up and down is easier, and I could have expected them to build in that limitation.
I was under the impression that some of the Adult Swim shows where largely animated using Photoshop & After Effects, but never got enough detail to know if their process included other
any other programs to produce. Much of it looks like it’s done this way-the characters animate
like Terry Gilliam cutouts, but lip sync like they’re swapping phonemes to match the soundtrack.
Which boils down to having a mouthless head, and all the different mouths nested in the project
to be flashed onscreen only at the frames they’re used for. If it does that trick I’m set.Thanks for taking the time. I just got Final Cut Studio, Shake, and CS4 Production Premium all in the space of a couple months, so sometimes I just need to skip to the specific questions. And they’re not always easy to find in a block of manuals a foot high, so I appreciate getting a few tips.
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