 Welcome back, it's time for another FNA and this time it's all about lip-sync and facial animation. And it's going to be a multi-part series because there's a lot to cover and specifically we are going to cover. Basic lip-sync blocking steps, which will be today. Then we're going to talk about eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, mouth and lips, cheeks, ears, the nose, the tongue, teeth, the jaw, jaw and head relationship, head structure and so much more. It's going to be absolutely bananas. But first let's talk about the general approach to lip-sync. What I was taught and what's very common and it's also totally okay is to do your body animation first, the body mechanics, the body language, everything has to be in place body-wise. And at the very end, you add the lip-sync. It's basically the icing on the cake. So if the body language and all that is not working in the first place, the lip-sync is not going to save your animation. That is absolutely a valid point. But there I say, what can happen with that approach is that you have your body in place and after that, you don't really tweak it anymore. You don't really change your animation based on the lip-sync and based on the energy and the vocal cues in your lip-sync. Meaning that you have something where your body moves around and your head moves around. But then the word is something very strong and has a big strong jaw animation associated with that, like whatever, like chocolate or whatever you want to say here. And if you have something that's strong where the jaw gets just really pushed and activated, that is going to bring down the head. It's going to influence the head rotation. And maybe because of that, you might have to change a bit of the neck and because of that, a bit of the chest. And that can fan out to the rest of the body, depending on if you whisper something or if you yell something. So if you do add your lip-sync at the very end, make sure that you do pay attention to the loudness, the energy, the yelling. Whatever you're going to do with the jaw and how that is going to affect the head, even if it's tidal with head accents. Because you don't want your animation to look like the body's one thing and the lip-sync was just kind of copy pasted and added on and has no influence on the body or just even your posing. And by posing, I mean, sometimes you can just parent the camera to your face kind of like a GoPro, kind of like a face cam. And then you kind of worry just about the shapes, the way they are looking through that camera and think that's kind of okay. But the way you say something from this point of view, compared to blah, blah, blah, blah, with the cameras like this, at that point, you're going to have to activate the cheeks more, maybe push the jaw a bit more. It's totally different and you're not going to worry about all that stuff here because you can't see it. So it's going to be more about that side and emphasizing and exaggerating, maybe adding more body emphasis on certain words versus if you just do it like this, you can see the face. Also straight on, you're going to worry about asymmetry. But if you do it like this on a profile view, you're not going to worry about asymmetry as much. It's when you look at the general shape and the profile. So as a whole, you got to look at what is the camera angle? What are the actions? Your lip sync with a static camera is going to look different than if you say something while turning the head quickly. You might not see shapes. You might have to exaggerate certain moments just to make it read. But if you just had a classic camera to the front for your face cam, it would look completely exaggerated and wrong, even though it's okay when you combine it with move. So what I like to do, this is very, very subjective. But my approach is that I actually do the lip sync at the beginning. And that doesn't mean all fine details and polish. But I'm used to rigs that are kind of heavier. Then once you have the camera move in there, maybe in the plate, when you have all the animation, the file can get very heavy. The scene is hard to scrub through. And then doing the lip sync, I don't know, sometimes it's just kind of tricky. It didn't work with this. So what I like to do is actually put like a very rough version of the lip sync on an empty scene, no animation. So you can kind of look around if it's kind of okay scrub through. It's not too bad. And then I put in the basic blocking. Because then I know the general facial animation is there really just really, really rough. But on top of that, now that I have my body animation, the specific camera moves or angles, I can see where I need to push the facial animation. Like I said, when the character is turned away or if there's a bigger move. So now I know, now I need to kind of push the animation. That being said, you would see the same thing even without facial animation. Just know at that point, I need to do this, this and this. I'm also looking at this from a point of view where I need to present the work and certain elements cannot be missing. Otherwise, the client or whoever might be confused in terms of what's going on. So you might have all your body, but then if you keep that fingers and face in default, they might not understand what's going on. So it's also kind of my approach because of who I'm presenting my shots to. And like I said, you can do lip sync at the very end. It's completely valid. Just me, I like to put the very rough elements at the beginning, including eye darts and blinks. And that way it's there. And then I put the body animation top of it and work with that, of course to make that work. Then I can see where I need to worry about different elements of the face that I need to push. Maybe shoot new reference for certain moments and so on. That being said, what do I mean by rough lip sync? So it's really, really rough. So what I do is I take the fist. I put my elbow on the table and put the fist onto my jaw and I go, all right, let's see what this lip sync is. Sounds totally stupid. The point is that I will feel where the big accents are on the jaw. So I can approach this kind of like the Muppets, where you have your basic jaw up and down. The main moment where the jaw needs to be open for certain words or certain sounds and also where it doesn't have to be open. But just because your character makes a sound doesn't mean that the jaw has to open. Otherwise you can have something where it's super, super busy. Because you can talk like this where I don't really do anything with the jaw and it's just all in the mouth. But hey, why not? And then I know, oh, that's the moment where I kind of pushed the jaw. But generally I feel out where are the jaw movements? Where do I need the big jaw accents? And then after that shape wise, I concentrate on the extremes. So ease and ooze, mm, ms and f, f. And that way for me, I have visually the big ends and outs, the big extremes. I don't worry about arcs in your mouth corners and all kind of intricacies in the jaw. But it gives me a general Muppet like up and down in the jaw and just the big shapes, especially if it's far away. You want to see the big contrasting moves of a big wide open or closed mouth shape for or whatever you have. And then the same goes for eyebrows. Because if the character is further away, so I'm going to have the big shape and emotional changes with the eyebrows in there in my first pass. So it's frowning, a big expression change. I don't want my face just to be neutral. I definitely don't want to do just the lip sync. So to me, it's going to be, like I said, the basic mouth and basic eyebrow animations. You know, it's frown, so serious or surprised just to make that clear. And same thing with just basic blinks. So I don't want the character to constantly look like this and just turn around and have those crazy eyes. You want moments where a regular blink, a blink on a turn or maybe a squint. Again, nothing too crazy where you spend too much time. Just the basic building blocks of that performance. So when you watch this and someone has no idea about the story or what's going on, they can tell characters sad, happy, anxious, whatever it is, just the basic story points have to be there. And you can rough that out very quickly. And if you want to save time, you can just animate a basic blink, maybe a faster blink, maybe a blink and hold, close and open and put that at the very beginning of your shot or in the minus or minus, you know, 10 frames or whatever you have. And then throughout your blocking, you can just take that moment, highlight, middle, master, copy, paste over. And then that way you almost build your little library of facial shapes, eye blinks, I do this with fingers as well. So that when I do my blocking, I just do my basic in Maya library and then I can just copy paste that over to a quick blocking. Unless you, of course, you have a shape library already because you animated with that character before. With everything I say, there are always exceptions and different approaches. That's kind of for me, the general approach. Now, if you have a very specific pantomime shot where you want more clarity in your face or you have a specific lip sync with more extreme shapes like an S that's very, you might want to make that shape super clear. Again, just for story clarity and emotional clarity, but overall keep it simple. And in terms of mouse shapes and the jaw movement, I would think in sounds and not words. Because again, if you do too much with the jaw, you're going to have that chatter. Too many shapes can be way too busy. So keep it simple. You can cheat the shapes just for graphic readability and clarity for the camera you're rendering through. But you don't have to go through all angles unless it's for a game or something without really necessitates a 360 fidelity in terms of all the shapes and non-cheated elements. But for me, I look through what is the camera angle? What is my render view? And I'm going to block out my shapes and everything towards that camera. And that's about it. So jaw and the mouse shapes for E and O and M and F and if you need this or something all those extremes and that will get you through the basic elements of your lip sync. Because ultimately what matters are the eyes. Because if your eyes are dead, your beautiful lip sync is not going to matter. But you can get away with some social lip sync but if the eyes are working, you see the thought process and the emotion in the eyes and say eyes and eyebrows. To me, this section is more important than the lower part. Unless of course there's an element to where it's all about the, you know, maybe there's something with the teeth or like a tongue element or something that's just so extreme. You really have to focus on this. But again, I'm talking general lip sync blocking approach for your audio, whatever you have that covers all shapes not something super extreme and specific. And that's it for the basic blocking approach. Like I said, there's a lot more to cover. It's going to be a lot more with actual Maya demos because you're going to have to show how do you build the shapes or you have to pay attention to in terms of the lip sync in terms of eye animation, how to form your blinks, what to watch out for when your eyes are too far and it gets blocked by the nose bridge and a lot more elements, but this will involve examples and demos. But for now I just wanted to give you a general overview and of course the comments are open. So as I'm going through all the parts of the series, if you see something I'm not covering or you have special requests or whatever you have, let me know in the comments if you can ask questions, you can request things. I'm going to cover that massive list that I have in front of me. But if there's anything else where you I really want you to cover this, let me know in the comments, of course. Speaking of you, if you feel like any of this is helpful, you know I have a workshop. So if you want to work with me, take a look at your shots and tweak them and just get them to the next level. You get all the information in the description. You can sign up at any time if you so desire. And as always, if you're still watching, I highly appreciate this. And if you don't want to miss anything that upload, you could subscribe and hit that button because then you will get all the notifications for all of my uploads. Speaking of which, that's it for me. For the end of the week, I will see you back on Monday.