Smoother lip sync tips with cycle layers?

[BigMontana]

I made a puppet with cycle layers for more than half of the mouth shapes. They were 1-3 frames long. It didn't feel as good as I thought it was going to, it almost seemed make it worse at times.

I drew the frames based off the neutral mouth, so each shape went from the neutral to the new mouth shape. But in practice they were usually starting at some mouth shape other than neutral and then going to the new shape, so the cycle layers looked weird.

Anyone have any tips for smoother lip sync with cycle layers? 

thanks

[keiko.yamada]

Hello,

I tried Chloe template -> Mouth -> "Ah" to add "Neutral" shape in the cycle layer group ("Ah"), and I saw that layer (based on "Neutral" under "Ah") appears in the cycle when "Ah" is invoked.

To check which layer is picked in what order, I set Cycle Layers -> Advance Every to bigger number.

Do you have your neutral artwork at the top of each group using Cycle Layers, if Cycle Layer -> Layer Order is Top to botton?

In general, I think you don't need to include Neutral in each shapes. Neutral will be used while no audio (or neutral Face), and mouth is animated from Neutral to the particular mouth shapes when audio starts.

I hope this helps.