S e c o n d e d I t I o n j a s o n o s I p a w I l e y p u b L i s h I n g, I n c

CHAPTER 1
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Learning the Basics of Lip Sync
CHAPTER 2
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What the Eyes and Brows Tell Us
CHAPTER 3
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Facial Landmarking
P A R T   I
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Learning the Basics of Lip Sync
In modeling
for facial animation, mix and match is the name of the game.
Instead of building individual specialized shapes for every phoneme and expression, we’ll
build shapes that are broader in their application and use combinations of them to create
all those other specialized shapes. On the animation front, it’s all about interface and max-
imum control for minimum effort. You want to spend your time being creative and ani-
mating, not fighting with the complexities that can emerge from having a face with great
range. It doesn’t sound like there’s much to these concepts for modeling and animating,
and, yeah, they really are small and simple—but they’re huge in their details, so let’s get
into them.
Before we can jump into re-creating the things we see and understand on faces, we first
need to figure out what they are. Starting on the ground floor, we’re going to break down
the essentials of lip sync and learn the only absolutes. Next, we’ll go into how basic speech
can be broken into two simple and basic cycles of movement, which is what makes the
sync portion of this book so simple. Finally, at the end of this chapter, we’ll take those two
things—what’s essential and the two cycles—and actually build them into a technique for
working.
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