When i was first getting started in character
animator, probably the hardest thing i had to do was create mouth sets for my characters. You know
it's easy to just draw the eyes or draw the nose or the ears or whatever, but the mouth you can
have up to 14 different shapes and it has to look like it's believable, like the character
is actually saying the words that you're saying in real time. and if
you're new to animation like i was that is a major undertaking. so in this
tutorial we're going to walk through everything we know about mouths in character
animator. we're going to start with a really simple mouth and just show the basics of how
that's set up. then we're going to move into something slightly more advanced that also has a
sad mouth in addition to the standard happy mouth, as well as a way to trigger custom mouth shapes
that you might want to add into your character's repertoire. and then finally we'll end with
some tips on how to create your own custom mouth set starting from scratch. i would highly
recommend following along to download the free mouth pack example file that we have it's in the
video description below that's going to include the files that we talked about today: a simple
and advanced mouth and a one-page pdf that goes into detail about creating your own custom mouth
set these mouths are available in both photoshop and illustrator versions so no matter what you're
using you will have examples uh that will help you get through this all right so i'm gonna start
with a character i'm making in illustrator but i'll be talking about photoshop as well along the
way so uh and most of the things i'm saying apply to both programs equally so i've got a character
here i'm working on and he's got you know his head his eyes his eyebrows nose everything except
the mouth so i'm gonna go into that character animator mouth pack that i just downloaded and
open up my mouth1.ai file and here it is now all the mouse are turned on currently so uh it looks
like everything is happening at once this is not how your mouth is normally going to look if i use
the eyeball toggles over here in the layers panel i could turn everything off except for neutral and
let's start here because this your neutral mouth whatever's called neutral is what you're going
to see when there's no input coming into the microphone so when you're not seeing anything this
is the mouth shape that you're going to see so usually it's a straight line or slightly curved to
give a slight smile or a slight frown but that's what we have for a neutral shape and then you
start to dig into these other mouths ah and d and so on all these different mouse shapes
and what's happening is when you say something character animator starts in the neutral and then
you say ah it says oh wait a second that sounds like this mouth shape so i'm going to do that and
then you say oh and it says oh wait a second this is the mouth i want to show and it keeps going
on and it does that really really quickly so you don't even notice that it's doing this this
switching it just happens rapidly and it looks it creates the illusion of the character actually
speaking now most of these mouths are pretty simple uh they're just a single group of shapes
that create you know a desired effect so here's my l mouth or my f mouth or my e mouth different
things you know some show the tongue more some show the teeth more some show a little bit of both
um and you know this is all up to your personal preference and style there's really no right or
wrong way to do this but for now we're just using this basic set but i noticed that some of these
mouse actually have a couple of variations in them so this ah mouth for example it has a one and
a two state here and the two state is slightly bigger it drops the jaw slightly more for that
second state so the reason you would do this for a mouth is you want to make it open a little
bit so the ah when you say ah your mouth is your jaw is dropping a little bit and what we can do is
when we bring this into character animator we can actually turn this into a two frame animation just
to give that ah mouth a little bit more fluidity uh feel a little bit better and more believable
you don't have to do this but i think for certain mouth shapes this really helps sell the
effect well so i'm gonna leave these on for this particular mouth shape the thing we're gonna the
ones we're gonna have to worry about for that are the eye mouth the uh mouth down here that also has
two different states and the woo mouth which also has two states okay so let's toggle these
all back on when i am copying and pasting mouths between characters i always turn all the
mouse on visible because it is really easy to accidentally only select the neutral mouth and
then you're only moving that and then you're like well wait where did all my other mouths go
and then they're in a completely different area of the puppet right so when i'm moving things
around i always try to keep everything together just so i see it all and i make sure it's all
coming together with me while i'm copying and pasting now illustrator has some particular ways
that you have to copy and paste things between your different files photoshop's a lot easier in
this respect and i'll show that to you in a second but for illustrator if i you know have these mouse
i say great i'm going to copy these so i'm going to select them here in the canvas i'm going to
go to edit copy go over to my character i've got this new layer i'm ready to paste them in edit
paste there we go and that looks perfect right this is looking good well not exactly because if
i twirl this open over here look what happened it forgot all of the layer structure and hierarchy
that i had and i would have to go in and try to manually you know group these together and do
some stuff that's terrible we don't want to do that so let's get out of that that's a bad idea
so the way to fix this is with your layers uh tab selected go over here into your menu icon the
little three lines icon that shows up down here over here click it and make sure paste remembers
layers is checked if that's checked then when you copy and paste all of your structure here is going
to be remembered and will show up so let's copy and paste this into our file for real so what
i'm going to do is marquee select this just by using make sure i'm on this selection tool click
and drag and that will select everything here on the canvas the other way to do that would be in
your layers panel find your mouth the parent group here and just click on this little circle at the
top and that's also going to select everything then i'm going to go over to edit copy let's go
over to our character over here he looks good and then edit paste and that's going to paste my mouse
set here i'm just going to click and drag this somewhere in my character i'm going to put it
maybe right here above the eyes and then use the arrow keys to position it to exactly where
i want to i could also click and drag around to wherever it looks best and then there we go and
now if i twirl this open i should see my layer structure was remembered and if i wanted to i
could toggle off all the extra states to just see the mouse set now the neutral mouth now you don't
want to just move this right because if you just move this mouth set this neutral mouth you're
going to lose your alignment with the other mouse so anytime you're moving the mouth around
you want to make sure you're moving the whole set so again i would turn everything on select
the group there and just move it down slightly maybe that's going to look a little bit better
let's turn all these off and see if that's looking better yeah so that's looking pretty good for this
character now luckily in photoshop this is way way easier to work with so i've got my mouth one psd
example file opened so i would just select the group in there edit copy go into my character that
needs a uh needs a new mouth here and go to edit paste that paste the mouse set exactly like i need
it to be and i can just drag it to wherever i want and that's looking pretty good i could also use
the arrow keys plus or minus shift to move them around and place it exactly right if i want to be
a little bit bigger or smaller i can just click this show transform controls up here and that's
going to allow me to drag the corners and make this mouth slightly bigger or slightly smaller
and if that looks good i can just double click it and that's going to set it into place and
then i can uncheck show transform controls so that's one way to do it another way you could
do it let's delete the mouth here go back is to just drag if you have tabs open with
multiple files what you can do is just click and drag this mouth file this group bring it over
top of the tab of the character you want to go in and then release it right around the area you want
let go and that's another way to bring it in make sure where you're dropping it though like earlier
i was uh practicing for this and i accidentally like put it in my right eye make sure wherever
your mouth is is in its own thing that's inside the head group and it's not inside your eyes or
any other group all right so as soon as i import my character into character animator i should
see that mouth set working as expected so as i'm talking as i say ooh my character should be doing
the exact same thing that i would expect them to do now there's a few things i need to tweak here
though first as you're talking you may notice that the mouse aren't showing up as often as you'd
like or maybe they're showing up too much and it feels too chattery well there's a few things
you can tweak to change that so let's go over here into uh character preferences on mac or that's
edit preferences on windows and if you do that you're gonna get your little preferences dialog
here once that's up let's go to the lip sync section and we have a few things we can play
around with so vision detection this is going to say do you want more or less mouse to show
up by default it's kind of a little bit more in the more side but if you want even more you
could slide it up if you want to see a lot less you can slide it down there so this is kind of
a trial and error thing do this and say okay i want to see less let's hit okay now as i'm
talking i should see fewer mouth shapes so this one i can tell it's not i'm not seeing as
many mouths show up it feels a little bit more restricted and for certain characters maybe if
you're going for a stop-motion style or 12 frames per second or something like that maybe this is
the style you want but for me i like to see them a little bit more particularly for this character
so i'm going to go back to my preferences and lip-sync and i'm probably going to set that
to the default camera-based muting i usually have all the way down but if you had this up what would
that do well if i hit ok it's only going to show mouse shapes if it can see your mouth actually
moving in the webcam so this is good if you have a lot of background noise if you have noisy roommate
something like that or kids running around screaming and they're setting off the triggers um
then if you move the camera based muting up then as long as you're not moving your mouth like
i actually am right now but i'm hiding it so the webcam can't see it it doesn't know that i'm
talking and it's not going to show any mouths so it's a helpful thing if you're in a particularly
noisy environment you have a way to go back to older versions if you want to not really important
i always keep it on the most recent version and then audio based muting uh if there are sounds
that go um below this uh this threshold they're not going to be picked up so if you are getting
a lot of background noise if you're in a noisy like air conditioner or computer hum or something
like that you might want to try lowering this and seeing if you know something helps a little bit
to get rid of that background noise and have that not trigger the mouse as much normally though i
think the default is fine you can always click restore defaults down here to go back to all the
default positions now if i go into rig mode up here uh remember we've got to add that frame by
frame animation to these certain mouth sets so we've got the eye mouth the mouth and the woo
mouth that each have two frames uh to make them uh show up and be a little more fluid so i'm gonna
do is select ah then i'm gonna hold down command on mac or control on windows and i'm gonna
do a and woo so now i have them all selected i'm going to go down here to the right click the
plus button next to behaviors and i'm going to add cycle layers to all three of these and then
scroll down here and you'll see all your settings and parameters for cycle layers now there's two
things you want to do i would recommend doing for your mouse shapes here number one i would suggest
checking hold on last layer because if you're saying ah and holding that note you want it to
stay on that second frame of animation you don't want it to stop or go back to one or go to another
vision you want it to stay on there so you want to make sure you can hold and then on trigger end we
don't care about our cycle finishing we just want to stop immediately it'll look more accurate if
you stop you know talk stop your mouth shape and immediately go into the next one so those are the
two i recommend i've seen people play around with some of these others you know sometimes they will
say okay let's cycle finish and do forward and reverse so it kind of goes back and forth between
the jaw dropping and back um that's totally a pro if you want to do that that's totally fine
personally though this is the way that i do almost all my mouse and i think it works
pretty well so if i go back to my character it's going to be very hard to see exactly where
those uh frames are happening those ah uh ooh things are happening it's really quick it only
happens you know one frame at a time um but it's it does add a little bit of extra fluidity
to the character now one extra thing that i like to add to my characters is a moving jaw as
well so i'm gonna find the background of this character in this case it's my face bg layer
and if i turn that off you can see yep that's the background of the face that's the main you
know skin behind it whatever the jaw is part of and i'm going to make sure that is set to be
independent so i'm going to click the little crown icon toggle over here to make it sure it's going
to move on its own just like many of these other elements then what i'm going to do is uh two
things i'm going to go down here to my stick tool and i'm going to drag a stick here right above the
mouth under the nose and i'm going to tag that as fixed and then i'm going to do another uh stick
down here right around where i want the chin to be basically and i'm going to tag that as jaw
and that's just this little thing in the little visual of the the character over here just click
the little thing on his chin and that's going to tag it as jaw so what does this do well let's go
back to record mode so now as i talk you'll see i have an exaggerated jawline that's moving with my
mouse shapes now by default this is probably too much right we probably don't want his jaw moving
this much so let's go and twirl open the lip sync uh behavior over here and jaw movement this
is the parameter that determines how much that jaw is going to move so if i want this to really
move i can bring it even higher and make him look completely ridiculous probably don't want that
usually i go for 15 to 20 so i'm going to type in 20 and try that and that's a lot more subtle but
it does add a little bit of extra believability to the character right it's not just the artwork
swapping above this lets it move around and because i added that fixed stick up here it's not
going to bend anywhere above that thick stick or at least it's not going to try to there might
be variations where you get the ears moving up and down if you have that attached to your face
background so play around with the placement of the jaw and the fixed stick and you can get some
pretty nice results of making your character talk a little bit more uh believably all right so let's
move into something slightly more complicated and have a mouth that can move between happy and sad
states and you'll be able to see that in the mouth to file either the ai file or the psd file i'm
going to start in illustrator but i'll show you photoshop after this so in this i've got a main
group called talking here and i've got two things a plus mouth group inside that has all the stuff
that we saw before although this is this is a slightly different looking mouth set um than the
first example and the alt mouth which is the exact same thing all the different mouth shapes except
it's kind of turned it down and frowning in a more sad view i would say so we have these two
separate mouth sets that each have the 11 different visimes inside of them so the process
to copy and paste these into another illustrator file is the same as before first just make sure
that paste remembers layers is checked and then go to select the uh the little circle here or you
can select everything on the canvas like that i'm going to select the circle and i'm going to go
to edit copy move over to my character over here and i'm going to go to edit paste and that's going
to bring my talking group with everything visible here i'm going to drag that in to my character
and then use the arrow keys to position it exactly where i want something like that now
i have my talking group with mouth and alt mouth here if i want to make sure things are
lining up correctly maybe i'll just turn on this turn everything off except neutral and make
sure i like that placement that looks pretty good to me so i'm going to turn these all back on and
let's bring this guy now into character animator and figure out how we're going to make this all
work but first really quickly i just want to make sure we cover photoshop as well so i've got my
mouth2.psd open here it's got the exact same structure as the illustrator file here's my main
mouth here's my alternative sad mouth i can just take this let's drag it over into this tab chad
over here and drop it where i want it and there it goes now i've got my talking set and i can arrange
it however i want all right so this character by default isn't looking that great all these mounts
are showing up but we only want one to show up at a time and the way we do that is with swap set
triggers so i'm going to take my talking group here the one that includes both the mouth and the
alternate mouth and i'm going to click and drag it into my triggers panel over here and as i do that
you'll see it says create trigger or create swap set for this i want to create a swap set i only
want one of these mouth sets to show up at a time and so i'm going to release over that and it's
going to make my new mouth swap set up here so i have talking and it says mouth is the default
because that's checked if i wanted my sad mouth to be the default i would just uh click that
toggle instead but i do want this to be the happy mouse to be the default one and now for the
alternate mouth let's just say i'm going to click over here and make this the one key to make that
appear and i'm going to go ahead and latch it as well so it's easier for me to switch between
the two kind of like turning a light switch on and off now in order for this to work the lip
sync behavior which is up here in the top of the character that's where all the eight behaviors
that we kind of give you by default show up that has to find that is to know that it's looking
for a mouth and right now it understands that this group this top group mouth is a mouth but it
doesn't know that alt mouth is a mouth yet it didn't automatically tag that so what i need to
do is with alt mouth selected is go over here and click it to make sure i tag it as a mouth
as well so now i have two different mouse sets i have my original mouth and my second mouth my
alternate mouth so let's go into record mode and see if this works okay so by default my character
is talking with the happy mouth set and let's see what happens if i press the one key and now he's
showing his sad mouth set instead so now you can see how just a small detail like this changing the
mouth adds a ton of extra emotion to a character so right now the character is happy go lucky he's
kind of positive he's optimistic but as soon as you turn the mouth upside down basically he is
unsure of himself or he's sad or he's angry or a lot of different things and i think to create
a really compelling character this is this is a must-have you really want at least these two
different mouth set emotions now you could have even more than this if you want a confused mouth
set if you want a really loud yelling mouth set you could keep adding additional mouth sets
into your swap set and have all these different variations um but i think if you're gonna
pick two you want the happy and sad variations and this works pretty well now i am noticing as
i'm talking sometimes i do see that i need to do the cycle layers thing for some of the frames
because i feel like i'm seeing two mouse showing up at the same time so let's go back into rig
mode so i'm gonna try to twirl these all open and do everything at the same time so i've got ah and
woo i'm holding down command on mac or control on windows and ah uh and wu these are the six that
i care about and again i'm gonna go down here to behaviors plus and add the cycle layers
behavior to all of them and remember the two settings i want to do hold on last layer should be
checked and set on trigger end to stop immediately and now if i go back this is looking a little
more fluid and when i press the one key now he's upset and that looks a little more
fluid as well now you're not just limited to the visemes you can also add in additional
mouth shapes that you can trigger at any time usually i feel like these are when you want
to exaggerate a certain expression a little bit so for this character in his talking group
i've got my mouth and my alternative mouth but then i also added a yell group here and see this
is a much bigger mouth if i really wanted this character be yelling or screaming maybe i would
do something like this so you can add additional things into your you know groups of mouths and
then trigger them when you want to you can just add them into the swap set so let's get back into
character animator with this saved and see how i would do this all right so back in rig mode i can
see that my yellow mouth shape is showing up here i've made it independent just like the mouth and
the alternative mouth and all i have to do is just drag this into my existing swap set down here
and now i've got an additional shape that i can switch to so let's do just what we did for the
alternative mouth i'm gonna make this a two key and i'm going to click latch and let's see
if this works in record mode all right so by default i've got my happy mouth uh if i press
one i've got my sad mouth and if i press two i have my yell so you could add a lot of these a
squiggly line for being confused or you could do a cycle layers where that mouth kind of undulates
and moves around for like a you know burp like a homer simpson style burp animation there are
tons of possibilities of what you can do and we've seen a lot of characters where the lip
sync doesn't just include the uh the mouth but maybe the nose too or a beard or other elements
uh instead of just the mouth shapes themselves so it's an area where you can expand and
explore a lot of different possibilities and lead to some really really cool
expressive emotions for your characters all right so you want to take the plunge and
make your own custom mouth set uh well this is not a five minute job this is at least going to
take a few hours maybe a few days depending on it um you know it's a trial and error process
you draw things in illustrator or photoshop bring it into character animator see how it's
looking make your adjustments and back and forth and so on and so forth now you don't have to do
all 11 of these you could actually do a mouth that only has you know a few of these um and character
matter is still going to do the best job it can to find the right viseme it has some fallback
mouse based on what you're saying but for the best results for the most accurate looking lip sync
you are going to want to uh have all of these uh show up now i'm not going to get too far in the
weeds of how to draw these exactly you know your drawing style is is might be different than mine
i i tend to like to make my mouth in illustrator i use the pen tool a lot i'm doing a lot of
clicking and dragging and all of this stuff and adding strokes to it and you know all of that
sort of thing um to to make a mouth set but you do whatever you want to photoshop's easier for you
if frescoes where you want to be you know whatever hand-drawn look clay mouse you do whatever you
want and whatever works best for you the biggest piece of advice though i have uh that separate the
thing that really changed for my mouse as i was starting to learn how to do them um we had a mouth
set you know for our main characters and we got a lot of advice back from the uh some professional
animators and the way that the number one thing that they said that helped was look at this so
i've got my own mouth and then my arm mouth and my eye mouth and everything is moving right there's
a lot of expansion the mouse getting wider and narrower and all this stuff but one part of it is
remaining constant and that is this top white line the top teeth you want to lock into place and no
matter what mouth you're in that should always stay consistent even if you're seeing more or
less of it even if it's dropping or moving up the jaw can move the mouth can expand the tongue
can jump up and down you can see the bottom teeth or not um depending on what type of mouth shape it
is but that top part that top white row you always want that to stay locked in place and that's
going to make your lip sync seem a little bit more consistent and fluid if you have your top
mouth moving all over the place and this is what i used to do when i was making my initial mouse
i'd be like okay i want my odd to be like this and my oh i really want it to be on the
side so i'm going to move it over here and yeah there's some stylistic ways
you can do that but for the most part you want this line to always stay locked into
place because otherwise your mouth is going to look like it's jumping all over the place
and it's just not going to look really good and it's hard to tell that when you don't know
you know you're doing lip sync for the first time but this is really helpful if it helps you can
press command r on mac or ctrl r on windows this should work in either illustrator or photoshop and
you can click and drag and bring down a guide and use that line to say okay this is where my line is
this is where the top teeth are always going to be and no matter what you're drawing you can always
stick towards that and that should really help so there's no one perfect way to do lip sync right
there's no one chart that you can use and it's going to work on every single character um even if
you look at the cartoons that maybe you you watch you know just find clips online of the simpsons
or rick and morty, bojack horseman stuff like that you'll notice that all their lip syncs look
very different and um but they have a set style and all of those cartoons have you know they know
what all of these mouse shapes are going to look like for their characters some have more some
have less it depends but um you know if there's a particular style you like check it out on youtube
and freeze frame it you know them talking and see the different mouth shapes and use that
as your initial inspiration not copying it but using that and seeing here's how they do
their tongue or their you know for their l shape or here's how they uh do their ah shape
or their neutral or whatever and use that kind of as a starting guide for creating your own mouth
set for me this is how i do it i keep the neutral as either a neutral smile or a slight frown
depending on what type of mouth i'm doing for the happy mouth i would keep this up and then i
would use that kind of as the guide the main curve for a lot of my mouths here all of them to kind of
have this top upper curve for the eye mouth that's going to be down like this and have a tongue kind
of off center at the bottom and again this is the one where i also drop it down to be a little
bit more dropped and then have that cycle layers uh for the the extra jaw movement which is nice
d i usually have is clinched teeth together um like this so the mouth is a little bit closed and
e is going to be a little bit further out with the mouth slightly open and no tongue showing up f is
an interesting one i see a lot of variation in how different cartoons do the f for me it's kind of
your your almost your teeth are kind of on the top biting the top of your bottom lip and it's it's
kind of that approach to it so i kind of have these bumps of uh showing that thing but there's
a lot of different ways to do that so check it out and how others are doing that as well the l
is always an interesting one it's kind of like the tongue is uh touching the back of your the
roof of your mouth basically uh and you see the top of the teeth so that's kind of the treatment
you can see all sorts of variations i've seen where the tongue is a little bit more pronounced
or a little more curved um you can kind of play around with that m for me is very similar to
neutral except i make it a little bit smaller it's a little bit um uh tucked in a little bit more and
so that's going to differentiate it from neutral so if you're saying an m sound um you know to
start or end the phrase and then you go to neutral there's a bit of a transition there so it
doesn't look like you're just sticking in neutral when a new sound is made um o and r
are very similar it's just that uh o is is slightly uh taller slightly more vertical
and r is slightly more stout horizontal that way so that's the way i'm doing those s is
almost like a mix between d and e i feel like it's like an extended like e but the teeth
are together um like like d so that's kind of a combination of the two uh i feel like is
a variation of ah it's a little bit similar but i feel like it's not as pronounced as ah so um i
make it a little bit uh smaller and same with the even the gap here the second version isn't even
as tall as the first version that starts with ah and then wu isn't uh just a you know without any
teeth without any uh tongue it's just a woo circle and for this one i've got a three stage one where
it starts and it gets slightly bigger and that's a really nice thing to do is make that woo appear
um like it you know it gets a little bit more to it as you say um the syllable all right so that's
a brief overview of how the mouths work and you know i talked about the example pack that's that's
free and you can download and get those mouse from but also if you go to the home page here feel
free to take the mouse of any of these puppets from the home screen as well or any of our example
puppets so you know uh toll is very similar to the one uh the mouth number two that's in the pack
but he's also got a laugh and uh getting angry and gritting his teeth and a few other things um
this troll mouth is great with some spiked teeth uh the unicorn stardust mouth is very expressive
and has a lot of different expressions soccer ball mouth all of these you can take them and copy and
paste them into your character to get at least a start and then if you need to tweak a few things
oh i need to make the tongue a little bit more pronounced or the mouth needs to be a little bit
bigger or smaller or on top of this skin color or whatever you have the flexibility to do that in
your original photoshop or illustrator artwork file so i hope you have fun uh bringing your
characters to life with all these mouth tips and we would love to see what you create with
this so please if you're using these mouse in any of your characters or you're creating
your own custom mouth set from scratch we'd love to see it so please use character animator when
sharing on social media so we can check it out and if you're running into any problems you rigged
your mouth and it's not working correctly or you can't trigger your sad mouth set or anything like
that the best place to get help is the official character animator forums. that's it for today,
thank you so much for watching, and have fun.
