mapping bezier animation to audio track

[Zak Peric]

HI There, You can map audio to an object parameters such as size, rotation,etc, but not to a specific bezier point if this is what you are asking.

[Ken Petti]

then how would you recommend matching an animated mouth with dialogue? is there a way to do it easily or will i have to animate it by hand?

[Zak Peric]

I think in this case you art best to do it manually.

[David Bogie]

Audio behaviors are difficult to wrap your head around but if you watch Mark Spencer’s freebies you can at least get started. You can apply several behaviors to your lie or to copies of the line. You can select the amplitude or freq range that is applied to the behavior. but these don’t give you mouth movements or phonemes, they just give you changes t the shape of the mouth object.

If you want to use phoneme-style mouth animation, you must build the basic set of mouth shapes and figure out a way to sub them into your sequence on cues or markers several times every second, just like old school animators used to do it.

In After Effects, we’d use expressions, changed with hold keyframes, to substitute a range of mouth shapes from a precomp. Pretty easy to do once the rig is built. I don’t know if there is a suitable analog in Motion. However, you’re not the first guy to try mouth animation in Motion so there has to be something on youtube or the rest of the Net you can search for.

Please come on back and tell us how you solved your challenge, It will really help others lookig for similar solutions.

bogiesan

[Doyle Rockwell]

Howdy,

As Zak said, by hand is the way to go. Even if you could drive select bezier points with the audio levels, they would be just that: levels. Even really basic mouth animation should have a few phoneme shapes (wide open, narrow open, pursed, tongue under teeth, etc.) and those different sounds don’t directly relate to the amplitude of the voice.

Unless you’re going for something really simplistic like a flashing light (i.e. robot), you’ll get much better (and surprisingly easier) results just doing it by hand. Take a look at the mouth animations for South Park or Yo Gabba Gabba. They’re very basic, effective, and always done by hand in a short amount of time.