trying to do freehand lipsync/animation

[johnl3d]

tried to animate fully in chor

 

 

wmv file because sound made file too big

will.zip

[jamagica]

Hmm...I don't quite understand what you were trying to do...all I heard was music, saw his arms moving, and his lips moving...no words

[johnl3d]

weird words come out when I play it and just checked again

[higginsdj]

He is singing the song you can hear playing!

[hypnomike]

Works on mine (windows media player and realplayer)

 

Nice work and a good idea. Are you finding it easier or more difficult than the dope sheet?

 

definitely in sync. I'd reccomend that when you tweek it you purse the lips more as he sings WILL.

 

Good luck and keep posting.

[robcat2075]

One thought: it looks like you're using IK arms, but in a situation like this where his hands never need to land on any external object, FK would be the choice.

 

It does take longer to crane FK arms into any particular pose, but the inbetweens from pose to pose almost always looks more natural.

 

But keep working on this one! It would be fun to see your performance for a whole line or verse even.

 

I wish A:M gave access to the audio compression in Quicktime. I wonder why it doesn't?

[hypnomike]

One thought: it looks like you're using IK arms, but in a situation like this where his hands never need to land on any external object, FK would be the choice.

Could you explain that in a little more detail please Garcon?

 

I just move the arms best I can but don't yet know the difference beetween an IK and FK movement.

 

Thanks!

[robcat2075]

Could you explain that in a little more detail

Well, I'm not an expert on this but...you'll notice the AM Rig has a pose to set "IK Arms Setup" to ON or OFF.

 

IK ON is great because you can drag the hand around and the arm bones will pretty much follow without you needing to set them.

 

But imagine a move like this: your hand starts down at your side, then moves up to your forehead to do a "salute". In real life you swing your arm to bring your hand up; your hand will travel in an arc made by your arm bones rotating from their joints.

 

An IK hand, however, doesn't really know much about the bones connecting it to the body. It just wants to move straight from start to finish. The hand would slide up the leg, drag up the chest and scrape the face getting to the forehead. If you had four people in a phone booth trying to salute each other they might have to do it that way, but in general, no.

 

With IK OFF, (aka FK, forward kinematics) you create the motion by rotating the bones at their joints, much like real life. Click on the bone, Hit R, and use the rotate manipulator rings to position the bone. I always start with the shoulder, then the elbow, then the hand. I act the pose out with my own arm to understand what each rotation needs to be. Because A:M is inbetweening rotations of bones instead of XYZ positions in space, the motion will usually be a nice natural arc.

 

You could add intermediate keys to an IK move to simulate that arc. In my little "Mount" clip, the left hand had to be IK to stay fixed on the horse, so I added several keyframes to the hand motion to try to round it out. It's still pretty squarish though. And more keyframes=more hassle when you need to retime things.

 

Some people, like ZachBG, have had success setting their arms to FK and dragging the hand as if it were IK . I have never gotten the hang of that. It's also possible to monkey with the bias of those IK keyframes to force better arcs.

 

All that said, this isn't a glaring problem in JohnL3D's clip, but as he adds to the performance he might find that the FK approach would simplify things overall.

[johnl3d]

I found that at least for singing this is easier than a dope sheet . In this case I was just trying the idea and the Maroon 5 song was stuck in my head from listening to the radio on the way home. I haven't done much animating so I'll keep in mind the fk and ik and try them. For now this is just another test idea but any suggestions will help as I get a story idea together and /or get something I really need/want to animate. Right now I could fill a couple cd's with test ideas but most last 2-3 seconds at best. Back to work..I mean entertaining myself...thanks again for the comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tinkering Gnome

[hypnomike]

Thanks for the info robcat, very useful!