Facial animation: Phoneme′s be gone
David M Breaux
Sr. Animator, Bioware, USA
: J Comput Eng Inf Technol
Abstract
Any serious animator worth their weight in frames has seen Preston Blair’s mouth expressions or heard of using phonemes for animating characters’ lip sync. In its day, this was quite an effective way for animators to break down dialogue into something manageable. The problem is hand drawn animation has never needed to been interested in recreating perfectly believable lipsync, after all the starting point of traditional hand drawn animation is already several steps away from realism. This thinking however has carried over into CG animation in a couple of ways. Often character rigs will have predefined shapes for a character which rightful so can be art directed which is often a desired trait especially if there is a large animation team or a specific thing a character is known for. However, these confine you to that shape, and create more work for riggers and modelers. Animators also loose a bit of control by the nature of this system. This system is also used often in games to automate facial animation since they often have a lot more dialogue to address than most feature films. However, it produces over-chattery results hurting the visuals and even kicking the player out of their suspension of disbelief. I am proposing a different method, now that CG offers us the ability for better or worse to infinitely tweak our animation to achieve the most subtle of motion. This is a technique I’ve developed over my 16+ year animating characters and creatures who needed to speak dialogue and it involves a deeper understanding how humans speak, what our mouths are capable of doing muscular wise, and how we perceive what someone is saying in a visual sense. It also takes some burden off the modelers and riggers, and simplifies controls for animators while increasing the control it affords them. I didn’t invent this, nature did. I’ve just refined how I think about it and distilled it down into a description that I’ve never heard explained this way.
Biography
