Recommendations for Automatic Lip Sync?

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have a recommendation for an automatic lip sync app? One that works directly from the audio file, if possible. The ones I have tried so far make mouth animation that is choppy and robotic. I'm looking for lip sync that is more natural looking.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I don't know of any programs for Maya so I might be wrong, but in my experience, that's just a matter of automatic lipsyncing. All the auto lipsyncs that I've seen always just take the audio and open the mouth more the louder the sound is, making the jaw just flap open up and down. Some do this better than others, and some will try and mimic the shape based on the sounds, but I don't think you can get smooth natural-looking lip movements from automatic systems - it's almost always heavily animated or motion-captured (or a combination of the two)

If it's possible for you to animate it, even simply, I think that'll give a much nicer look. (Though, that might not be possible for you if you're dealing with massive amounts of movements in a short amount of time) If you're struggling to animate lips, it always helps to look in the mirror and repeat the dialog with very exaggerated mouth movements to get a feel for how it looks. 

After doing some poking around, there is this interesting program, MocapX , which will mirror your facial movements into a Maya scene, but it's a pay-for plug-in and you need an iPhone X, 11, or iPad Pro.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response. I've played with facial tracking a bit. It seems to work pretty well to capture eyebrows, and the basic mouth movement, but doesn't do anything for the tongue. But the real issue for me is matching the timing with the sound of the dialog. I could see if I was doing my own voice acting and recorded the audio at the same time as the motion capture. Then I would know that the data matched the audio. I would still have to come up with a way to sync the two, which I could think of.