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Slider control and character mouth rigging help
I have a semi complex idea that I am trying to work out. I am not very good at expressions/scripting after effects, so bare with me as I try to explain this. I will provide the project file as well so that you can check it out and hopefully help me with this.
So I am trying to make a mouth shape rig for character lip-syncing animation. I have 15 different mouth shapes, that I created in illustrator, that all use the same amount of shapes, with each shape using the same amount of vertices between all 15 mouths.
The shapes are –
Lips (a stroked path, 8 vertices)
Top Teeth (a filled shape, 8 vertices)
Top Gums (a filled shape, 5 vertices)
Tongue (a filled shape, 8 vertices)
Bottom Teeth (a filled shape, 8 vertices)
Bottom Gums (a filled shape, 5 vertices)
Throat (a filled shape, 8 vertices)
I am using the “Throat” as a mask for all of the other shapes, excluding the “Lips”. The “Lips” and “Throat” have nulls connected to each vertice, and the “throat” will be a mask for all of the other shapes, excluding the “Lips”. the “Lips” nulls will drive the entire animation, revealing the other shapes as the lips move from one mouth shape pose to another.
The problem I am trying to solve is this – I want each “Lips” nulls position to be tied directly to a slider/UI element so that I can easily move from one mouth shape pose to another without having to individually keyframe each Null object.
Here are some of the ways i’ve tried to accomplish this –
I pre-comped each mouth shape, added nulls to each of the vertices for the “Lips” and “Throat” shapes and then used this this expression connected to a null that sits outside of the individual mouth shape comps to drive which comp is displayed.
layerNum = 1
control = comp(“compname”).layer(“layername”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
if(control == layerNum)
{value = 100;}
else
{value = 0;}
This way mostly works, but it creates over 100 null objects inside this project, which makes it hard to give to other teammates whose PC’s can’t handle massive projects like mine can, which would force me into being the only animator on this project haha. I also don’t know how to make the slider “Snap” to whole numbers which slows down animating because we have to type in the number for each mouth shape. Thats not really the biggest deal, but if there is a way to have the slider snap to whole numbers that would be fantastic.
I’ve also tried combinations of the plugins “DUIK” and “Joysticks and Sliders” to make this work, but nothing has come of it in a way that makes this easy to animate.
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1 Reply
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Hey Taylor! Don’t know if this is gonna help, but I did this in the past and worked well for me. I’ sending over an Ae file where I made different key poses for a mouth and I linked it to a dropdown menu where you can choose which pose you want and keyframe it. I’m simply having the path value changing depending on that menu with this expression here:
var s = effect("Dropdown Menu Control")(1).value;
key(s).value
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