Lip sync

Now that the main action scenes are staged and are ready to texture then render I concentrated on getting the lip sync made. After having a lengthy discussion with Mitch we decided that I would try and incorporate my soldiers hearing something in woods around and being a little spooked while Mitch would show his ninjas talking about the plan of attack. Looking around for a small amount of time I found the perfect scene for which I could use for my own lip sync, this was from a Game of Thrones episode when some of their soldiers were spooked by something in the woods which would match our overall cinematic perfectly. I found the audio that I needed which I then cut it down into an easily usable file.

After I had sorted out the audio I imported it into my maya scene which I had build a small little camp and then I position a few soldiers around showing that it was being used. It was at this stage we new that we had to find some better quality trees, luckily Eitvis had made some trees in his Spec 3D project so we decided to use those rather than taking up extra time to make our own from scratch, as soon as we put the new trees in, it made the scenes 10x better overall even without any textures or renders.

I wanted to concentrate on the main man for the lip sync, this was quite easy due to having the face controls near the head and the GUI is very easy to use. I started off getting the jaw opening and closing at the correct times, then moved onto putting in the specific phonemes for each of the sounds that come through the audio. One bad thing about using this audio is that he speaking pretty fast so its hard to get the mouth looking normal but I persevered and it all worked out in the end.