Limits to Lip Sync?

[Pitcher]

I was going to have a five minute conversation between two characters interrupted by flashbacks, scenes that illustrate a point being made, etc. Then I was going to put my cameras at three different positions and render. Finally, I was going to cut and edit the whole thing into a conversation with intervening scenes fading in and out. It seems from various experiments that the lip sync part of the program starts breaking down after about two sentences. Phonemes stop appearing on the lips of the speakers. Eventually, the lips of the speakers start tying themselves into knots. Is there a limit on the lip sync part of the program? Is the limit in syllables, phonemes, or what? Is there another way to shoot a long conversation, or do I have to make a hundred or more action files?

[Wildsided]

I make pose sliders for the phonemes and go through audio sliding between them to match up the correct sound with the correct mouth shape.

[Pitcher]

I was going to have a five minute conversation between two characters interrupted by flashbacks, scenes that illustrate a point being made, etc. Then I was going to put my cameras at three different positions and render. Finally, I was going to cut and edit the whole thing into a conversation with intervening scenes fading in and out. It seems from various experiments that the lip sync part of the program starts breaking down after about two sentences. Phonemes stop appearing on the lips of the speakers. Eventually, the lips of the speakers start tying themselves into knots. Is there a limit on the lip sync part of the program? Is the limit in syllables, phonemes, or what? Is there another way to shoot a long conversation, or do I have to make a hundred or more action files?

 

The pose sliders sound like a great idea! Thanks!

[Pitcher]

I make pose sliders for the phonemes and go through audio sliding between them to match up the correct sound with the correct mouth shape.

[robcat2075]

The automatic Lip Synch is an interesting idea but it tends to result in over-animated mouth motion and tuning that is probably about as much work as a more direct approach like Wildsided suggested.

 

You can get a lot of lipsynch done with just an open/close pose.