The first step to the recording process
is understanding and working with audio.
So recording and editing is
different in character animator.
Essentially, you're going to need to take at least
three different takes or passes on your animations.
So the first pass is going to be audio,
the second is probably going to be your face
gestures, things like eyes and head tilts, and the
third pass will be your triggers.
With that in mind, since we're going to talk about
audio in this video, we're going to bring in a
puppet that has a little bit more of an advanced
mouth with the vazims, the mouth shapes that you might
want to use for your puppet.
So we're going to basically swap out magnus here.
So what I'm going to do is go ahead and
import from the project files rob rigged and ready and
it's a little different than the Rob source puppet.
It's Rob with all of the coolness
that you might want to add.
So the dangles are in there.
Yeah, we can go ahead and zap magnus,
turn him off, make sure Rob is armed.
Okay, so you've got two options when it comes to
that first recording pass, and that is you could either
bring in some prebuilt or recorded audio from a dedicated
sound design app like adobe Audition where you could clean
it up and apply effects and do all that, and
I would strongly recommend you do that.
So the workflow for that would be to go ahead
and export that right from audition as a wave file
or mp3 and then import it into character animator.
So if I go to, hey, there people from the project files
you can see, we can add audio files to the project.
And if I drag that on top of Rob, the
way that we work with pre made audio is to
simply select the audio track and go to timeline and
go to compute lip sync take from scene audio.
That's a mouthful, but when you click
that it's going to autogenerate the vazims.
Now these are going to be inaccurate. Okay.
They're about 70% accurate. Okay.
So that means you're going to have to do
some cleanup and you could wait and do that
at the very end if you prefer.
But I'd kind of like to take
these as one step at a time.
So do all the audio edits, do all
the face edits, do all the trigger edits,
but it's a personal preference thing.
So if I did want to clean this up, a
little bit of sort of a pro tip will be
to rather than playing back in real time with the
space bar, there are people that's pretty fast and it's
kind of hard to see where everything comes in.
They've got a nice option here where
you see the one times text there.
You can actually make it playback slower so that
it's going to sound weird, but you're going to
actually be able to retime things a lot better.
So if I play it back, okay, I can still make
out the different sounds, and I can probably retime this better.
So for starters, I could tell that,
hey, neither of these is probably accurate.
So notice that these are all the
Vazims I've got to work with.
Some have shut off screen here a
little bit, but there's no H, right?
There's A.
But you might want to try something
that at least changes the mouth shape.
So there are times when you're kind of looking for
one that might just at least generate something different.
Okay, so maybe I'll start with the shape I
make when I say D and then A.
And then there's like a th.
All right.
The R is correct, so there but I
need this to be more of a th.
So a nice keyboard shortcut is if you've got your
edit line somewhere and you want to split it.
On a Mac, it's Command Shift D.
On a PC, it's Control shift D.
And you can see that that split that up.
So down at the bottom, I've got L
here, and L and th make the same
sort of mouse shape that funny shape, right?
All right, now the people
is actually right here, right?
And the O is not correct.
So I'm going to actually hit Delete, and you can see that
it moves the L to the very end, and that's good, but
it still feels like it needs the P poll, right?
So let's give this again.
Maybe we'll cut it where we can
get something akin to a P sound.
So up here you can see that M is both B and P.
All right.
For the mouth shape.
So if I play that, it's getting pretty close.
So you're going to need to do a little bit sort of
sound design or mouth design for all of your audio cakes.
Now, the other option you have is to just
grip it and rip it inside of Character animator.
And what I mean is to actually
record straight up inside of the app.
Before I hit record, I should pay attention to all
of the other things I have armed for record.
And because I want to break this into
parts, I really don't want to have eye
gaze or dragger or the face movements.
I just want to focus on the audio and the mouth. Okay.
So I've disarmed any behaviors I don't want to
record, including things like triggers, only the lip sync.
Okay, so here we go.
Rock and Rob here.
Okay.
And you can see Rock and Rob here.
Again, I would want to go in there and
change some of the Vizims because it starts with
an R sound and it comes much later.
So there'd be some cleanup to do. Right.
So that would be a raw aww, maybe
an A sound that maybe that's fine.
Right?
And this takes, you know, a little bit
of a little bit of work in practice.
rocking rough here.
Not bad.
So that is how you can record audio or
import audio and generate mouth shapes in character.
animator.