Veggietales... lypsynch question.

[Blueman]

I am curious to know this as well. Exactly how are those models set up for dialogue, and how would you set up a model in a similar fashion?

[the Rev.]

Hey blue!

I got an answer from a Big Idea animator...

he says that the mouths are really animated splines with some sort of MEL script that shades the rest of the mouth.

Take a look at the featurettes in the Jonah DVD... you can actually see the animated spline curves.

Pre-Maya days, they used to animate texture maps...


I also inquired about the rigging... and I found out it is a lot more complex than what I expected.

As they would say in the Golf channel... "those guys are good"

-g

[steveblake]

Yup no doubt about it, they were and are a talented bunch!

- Wonder if Big Idea is going to release more of their in house scripts as Mike Comet hinted at a while back...

:)

[Pttr]

Steven-> Sure hope so!

[JBarrett]

Originally posted by the Rev.
Pre-Maya days, they used to animate texture maps...
More specifically, it was a series of different maps created via a separate animation pass. A flat shape was animated and rendered, and this render was used to create a variety of image sequences which were applied to the characters. One for bump, one to cut a hole in the surface, one for specularity, if I remember correctly. The new Maya setup made things a lot easier, as all three effects were done via some shader trickery tied to the animated mouth curve in the character files.

From what some of the early animators told me, the old way made lip sync a lot tougher in several ways. For one thing, Softimage didn't allow for audio scrubbing back then, so they had to manually break down the audio files before animating (IIRC). They also didn't have any tools to sync the audio and the video on their workstations, so they opened two separate programs - one to run the video of the mouth-only animation, one to play the audio for the shot - and tried as best they could to sync the two by (no joking) hitting the button on the audio player at the right time as the video player looped.

Thank goodness for "modern" technology. :)

Justin (former BIP animator)

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