[Andy Neil]

Sorry, no real tricks for the mouth. Because you really need to edit that based on the dialogue. Now, if you were going super lo-tech and only had an open/close mouth pieces, then I might suggest going with the audio parameter behavior.

If I were in your spot however, I’d be tempted to build the individual mouth pieces based on phonetics and draw them in Photoshop. then bring them in as stills into FCP and edit the mouth pieces there. It’s far easier in my mind to scrub audio and cut the mouth shapes as clips next to each other than by doing some weird workaround with opacity, or cropped sequence replicators or some such. Once cut together, you can bring them into Motion to complete the animation.

Anyway, that’s how I’d do it.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Andy Neil]

I hate to say this, but it kinda sounds like what happens when the gfx card starts to crap out. Can you test it on another machine to rule it out?

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Andy Neil]

You made me a little curious, so I thought I’d see if I could streamline the process a bit.

Now I only messed with the eyes, but it was certainly easier than keyframing. First I built the left eye as two shapes: an eyeball and an iris. I grouped those 2 shapes and called it Open Eye. Then I duplicated the eyeball shape, changed the color to flesh and grouped it with a black bezier line across it like a closed eye. That group I placed below Open Eye so that it would only be visible if Open Eye were transparent.

To create the transparency I applied the Negate behavior to the Opacity of the Open Eye group and made it 4 frames (I felt any shorter didn’t read as a blink). Then I just duplicated that behavior and moved it to various points on the timeline. I was finished with the blinks in about 30 seconds.

For some extra fun, I decided to play with the eyes moving. I used a combination of Randomize, Quantize, and Clamp behaviors all applied to the X position of the iris shape. After about 15 minutes of messing around with the parameters I was able to get the eyes to randomly shift. Combined with the blink, it looked really good to me. Best part was that I didn’t have to do any keyframing which means I could lengthen the project to however long I need it, and not have to do anything more with the eyes.

Finally, since eyes work in pairs and blink in pairs, I simply cloned the LT EYE group and called that my RT EYE and I was done.

Here’s the result:

https://reels.creativecow.net/film/eye-blink-test

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Andy Neil]

Hey Mark. Here’s the URL to my You Tube Channel (for some reason, the link wasn’t showing up properly on the post.

https://www.youtube.com/user/TimesaverTutorials

And here is the link to the specific tutorial that shows how to resize/reposition media inside a drop zone.

Manipulating Drop Zones in Motion

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

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[Andy Neil]

I discovered a method that allows you resize images inside a drop zone. Best of all, it works in 3D projects as well. I’m actually going to create a mini tutorial on my You Tube page that shows off the technique if you’re still interested.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Andy Neil]

It’s possible that the alpha was not interpreted properly by Motion. What do you get when you select SHIFT+A (show alpha only) in your canvas?

Here’s something you can try:

Select the layer in the layers pane. Hit SHIFT+F to show media file. Go to the media tab in the inspector and look at what it says for alpha.

If Motion misinterpreted the alpha info, it might say none/ignore. You can try choosing Straight from the drop down and see if that does the trick.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Andy Neil]

Are you viewing properly in the canvas? Hitting SHIFT+T will make the background transparent for all layers containing an alpha. SHIFT+A shows black and white alpha channels, and SHIFT+C shows RGB color and is the default view in motion.

Andy

[Andy Neil]

Like I said, you’re probably better off with the replicator than with an emitter.

Andy

[Andy Neil]

I’m not sure that a particle emitter is what you want. If you think of an emitter as a gun and the particle as the bullet, you’re limited to how you can affect the particle once it’s been emitted. You may have better luck with a replicator and the sequence replicate behavior.

Andy

[Andy Neil]

how exactly do you want the particles to behave? The easiest method for particles to follow a particular path is to make their speed 0, and then animate the emitter along the path. Particles will be born along the path but not move off it. Since the emitter is moving, new particles are born at different points along the path.

Andy