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Question

Sad mouth visemes not working

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 22, 2020
5 replies
1097 views

Hi, I'm fairly new to Character Animator – I discovered it at Adobe Max this year. I love what I've been able to do so far! I have developed a character based on Dave Werner's PhotoShop Blank, that generally works pretty well. But when I trigger sad mouth while recording, I just get the default sad mouth and no other visemes. The jaw is moving but there's no mouth action. I've spent hours trying to figure out what I've done wrong – but I can't get it to work. I'm sure I've just done something stupid! Any help would be hugely appreciated, bearing in mind I'm a beginner! Here's a link to the puppet:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kkDkVZn9CuljpuqQZj9gl247Gp03OCL9?usp=sharing

Thanks! Ian

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alank99101739

Legend

The triggers panel should have mouths with two triggers in it - Mouth (default) and SadMouth (with a trigger for keyboard key 5). Once you clean up all the other tags and behaviors it started working on my copy of your puppet. All the extra stuff was getting ch confused.

I

ianpricewatkinsAuthor

Participating Frequently

I can't thank you enough for sticking with me through this. Your suggestions have worked and now I have a working SadMouth. Yay! Not only have you been extraordinarily helpful, but I have also learned a lot about how to structure the puppet logically. Much of what I was doing was guesswork – no surprise there! Thanks again, Ian

alank99101739

Legend

Next set of problems. Your SadMouth layers have extra behaviors added. See the little lego bricks and triggers? I think you want to remove all the extra behaviors and triggers on those layers. I think you only want a trigger on "Mouth" and "SadMouth" to make one or the other appear. There are all sorts of "Cycle Layers" behaviors which displays the children in order (which there are none in most cases).

alank99101739

Legend

The "Uh" and "W-Oo" layers are they only two that I think you want "Cycle Layers" behaviors added, like the normal mouth above. The rest should be blank.

For the triggers, have a look in the "Triggers" panel (underneath Project on the left)

You only need "Blank/Head/SadMouth" there - none of the children need to be there. The default is correctly "Blank/Head/Mouth". So that swapset will display Mouth or SadMouth (but never both at the same time).

To delete the triggers, I clicked the little 'x' next to the child layer names in the Triggers panel above, leaving just SadMouth at the top.

To delete the behaviors, I clicked on the layer, then looked over in the properties panel on the right. You will see the behavior there (LipSync for example is on the "D" layer). Use the 3 line menu to "Remove behavior from 'D'". Repeat for all the other layers. You only want a "Cycle Layers" behavior on layers with "1", "2" etc as children. The rest should have no behaviors on them.

alank99101739

Legend

Oh, the SadMouth viseme layers have extra tags too - lots of Mouth and MouthGroup tags. You will need to remove them all as well. Each viseme layer should have one tag, the viseme name. The "D" layer for example has a Neck tag added (!!). You "Ah" layer also has the "Uh" tag instead of the "Aa" tag I think (they renamed it at some stage). Remove all the extra tags, get them nice a clean, then look at LipSync again like you did before. You should see all visemes with 2 layers per viseme. If not, double check the exceptions.

Also check out the Rigging Issues panel

These also give hints of problem areas.

That might finally leave you with what is the difference between Mouth and MouthGroup. I never worked that one out myself to be honest! But it looks like MouthGroup is not being reported as a warning, so it seems like MouthGroup is more important than Mouth in terms of tags...

alank99101739

Legend

Okay, I have loaded the puppet up. Most of it is correct, but there are some extra stray tags going on that is getting it confused. The LipSync is correct - there are some on Blank/Head (they should be removed) and there is one in the torso.

First Head:

Click the Head layer in the rigging hierarchy. You should see the image above. Then click the little "x" next to the Mouth and MouthGroup in the diagram to delete those tags from the Head layer. This one is important because it is suppressing the tags on the nested real mouth layers (the behavior found the mouth it thought so stopped looking). Once you delete these tags the LipSync should be healthier:

Next, expand the Blank/Body/Torso/[Replace ] 4 layer and remove the "MouthGroup" tag from there as well.

After that I think the mouths should be correct.

alank99101739

Legend

I have not tried puppet yet, but from your screenshot you might have the mouth tag on head and the normal mouth, but not the sad mouth. You can see the tags for a layer in the properties panel. Behaviors look for tagged layers - it automatically adds some tags for you, but you can manually set them as well. So yes, i think the behaveior screenshot showing Mouth on head is a bad sight and no tag on sad mouth layer is another bad sign.

I

ianpricewatkinsAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi alank99101739,

Thanks for getting back to me with your helpful advice! As a newbie – I'm still a bit stuck on this and I can't figure out how to add these tags manually. So I should aim to remove the mouth tag from head and try to add the mouth tag to sad mouth? I'll keep on trying, but at this stage I think it might be simpler to just rebuild the whole thing from scratch and hopefully not get it into a tangle this time. Thanks again!

alank99101739

Legend

The tags are pretty easy to do. If you go into rig mode, click on the "Head" layer in the rigging hierarchy, I *suspect* there will be a Mouth tag on it. On the right, in the properties panel, if you scroll down it should have a "tags" section. I personally click the little "A" icon to show the tag names as text. The pretty graphics I find harder to be sure what tag is what.

In my example, I clicked on the "Head" layer on the left and you can see it only has the "Head" tag on the right (after I clicked the "A" button on the right). I suspect you will have Mouth there as well. That is why your LipSync screenshot showed two bindings for Mouth at the top, Blank/Head and Blank/Body/Torso/Replace 4.... ummm, WHAT DA!! (I have no idea why you have a Mouth being detected in the Torso!)

To remove a tag, just click on the yellow on the right - it will remove it. To add it to your layers, select the layer on the left and click the "Mouth" tag on the right so it turns yellow.

But I will try to download puppet and have a look a bit later when I have a few more mins. I thought it was something simple, but the LipSync on closer examinination looks a bit strange.

I

ianpricewatkinsAuthor

Participating Frequently

ps. Could this be the problem? I just noticed that sadmouth is not included in some of the viseme properties under lip synch. See screen shot. It just seems to be for Neutral and Ee. If that's what's doing it, how do I add sadmouth within the square brackets under each viseme shown?

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