Animating the mouth to the audio - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Animating the mouth is one of the toughest things to do in animation. It takes a lot of patience and note-taking and listening to sounds and tweaking the smallest of detail. I'm going to give you two tips though that will help you through this process. The first is like all animation that we've done so far, you just want to use as few controls as possible. So I'm going to go to Pose mode and just select this little hamburger control. Now you can use corners of the mouth and these lips may be quite helpful as well, but you really don't want to use any more than that. I'm just going to select the two lips right here and this kind of hamburgery looking thing, and then I'm going to hit Shift + H. The second thing is being able to leave markers. If I move this up a little bit I can come anywhere in my animation and hit M and then hover over the triangle and hit Control + M and I can leave a note. Such as note. Of course, if I want to, I can also hit X to delete the marker. That'll help us a lot when animating the face. And you know what? I'm going to give you one more tip. Go to Playback and turn on Audio Scrubbing. It may sound weird at first, but it'll help you tremendously. As we move forward I want you to concentrate only on the sounds, not necessarily the words, the punctuation, or anything like that. Just listen for the sounds, especially the vowels and how they contrast against the consonants. All right, let's go ahead and play a little bit. (audio stuttering) There's a lot right here happening. This is the beginning of the du of the dude. So I'm going to hit M and Control + M and type in Du. This sounds more like an oo. So hit Control + M, oo. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, so we can get some good detail. (audio stuttering) Now, if for some reason this comes up that's because you need to hover literally right on this little triangle. There we go. (audio stuttering) This is where the S begins. (audio stuttering) Now, if for some reason this gets moved over, it's okay, you can just always come back. (audio stuttering) There's actually a lot happening here. There's an er, and then a va. (audio stuttering) Let's move this E-R back, you can always select it and hit G to move it around. (audio stuttering) This is where the V is happening. (audio stuttering) This is starting to become more like a T right here. (audio stuttering) There's a lot of S'ing happening there. (audio stuttering) There's a B, it's really soft, but it's in here. (audio stuttering) There's a K right here. (audio stuttering) And I'm going to say that the mouth is closed right about here. So now we've left ourselves a lot of a little marker notes. Let's play it. - [Man] Dude, I serve a society by rocking. - [Instructor] You can always a highlight them and it'll show them a little bit better. - [Man] Dude, I serve a society by rocking. - Okay, now with these notes, let's actually go ahead and animate the mouth. So this is the du, so I'm going to put the position right here. And I want to delete any keyframes in front of this, so I'm just going to hit X to delete them. There we go. (audio stuttering) Du. You can get these positions just by moving the control around. (audio stuttering) Now you'll see that this pink keyframe is from before. I don't need it, so I'm going to delete that by hitting Delete. (audio stuttering) Here's the thing about this animation too, you're really hearing the transitions from no sound. So you can imagine maybe his mouth closes a little bit, but maybe not all the way. And then the transitions again when a sound is about to happen. (audio stuttering) And especially the transitions when we slur our words and go from one to another. (audio stuttering) This is where the lips will help us out a lot. Now be careful about these lips though. If you don't have any animation, they'll be open the whole time. Let me show you. (audio stuttering) So be sure to set a clear key right there, so that they're not open all the way. And just open instead for the S part. (audio stuttering) I'll clear them right about here. And I'll Shift + D and bring this out to about here. All right, now let's go back to our main control. (audio stuttering) Sure. If you find yourself literally making the mouth shapes as you're animating, you're doing it right. (audio stuttering) In fact, I'm doing the same thing and I'm just feeling out how those shapes would be. (audio stuttering) Now, these Bs are really important. You want to move your control all the way up and anticipate right before they happen. Because I'm so close to the T and the I, I'm going to move these back a little bit and move this one here instead. (audio stuttering) By, there we are. (audio stuttering) I missed a A sound that happens a lot sooner. It's right about here. (audio stuttering) This is where that K happens. (audio stuttering) There we go. Now let's go ahead and play that and let's zoom back out. - [Man] Dude, I serve a society by rocking, okay. I'm out there. - [Instructor] You can see, just in this video alone, we were able to get the mouth sunk up right here, but there's so much to do. And there you have it. We've sunk up a little bit of the dialogue audio to our animation. As you can see, this process takes a lot of patience and a lot of time. So use the marker system to leave yourself notes, so that way you can go ahead and animate it. With a little bit of patience and concentration you'll have this whole scene done in no time.