Jason Ryan Tips and Tricks: Polishing Facial Animation and Lipsync

A couple of great videos from Jason Ryan's Webinars where he is covering facial animation. Some more insight to his workflow and process.

Enjoy!

JP

Evil Minion

omg, so much fun!

15 Dialog Phonemes

These are the 15 lipsync poses I use most when creating a first pass on my dialog animations.  I got into great detail with my facial animation videos on how to implement these.  If you get these poses built and placed on a shelf, you should be able to map out dialog for a scene quickly and effectively.  This is only for a first vanilla pass at dialog, but it gets you closer to nailing that dialog than any other method I have tried.  Good luck!

Facial Reference Library

Over the years, I have used this tool I created called the Facial Reference Library (both when I have led teams on shows and taught animators in schools).  I built it to explain the different lines of action in the face when a human/animal is experiencing an emotion.

My teaching philosophy encompasses leaning by sight/visual, text and finally by doing it yourself.  This document covers all three for each emotion.  You have a dictionary definition of the emotion and a description of the lines of action that happen in the face along with a simple emoticon that shows those changes. In addition, there are several images for each emotion take from all over the internet from google, flickr, etc. to show the range of that emotion and how the expression plays out on the face.

The FRL is a tool my animators use and love, and now I offer it to you publicly here for free to use.  I worried about doing so, because many of the photographs used to show each emotion are not mine, they are just photos I have found over the years on the Internet.  But, in the name of learning I believe that is okay.  I am not offering this tool for money, so hopefully people will see the good in sharing these images with everyone.

Have fun!

Facial Reference Library