Insanely Easy Lip-Sync Animation in After Effects

hey welcome back to another video in this tutorial we're going to learn how to do lip syncing and we're going to be using a neat tool called sf caddy this tool helps us to animate our mouth poses really easily so with that being said let's get started okay so step number one in creating your lip sync is you're gonna go to a website like pinterest or google images and search for a reference i just search for cartoon mouth lip sync and it came up with a bunch of these references now the most useful part of this step is that it gives you all the different poses that you need to create for your character this is pretty much already down to a science so you don't need to reinvent the wheel here people have been doing this for a long time so the poses that you need to adequately animate your character talking have already pretty much been established so this is a pretty good reference and i like it because it's simple so i'll just copy that image and i'll go to illustrator paste that image up here and just keep that as my reference okay so at this point in the process i'll find a good podcast and i'll get to work creating my poses based on this reference now the one reference that this does not include is just a neutral pose so i'll have to keep that in mind as i create my mouth poses and so with that being said i'm gonna fast forward through this part because this is not an illustrator tutorial and i'll see you guys on the other side [Music] okay so now that i have everything all drawn out i will bring these mouth poses into after effects so let's jump over to after effects so now i have all my mouth poses here in a composition in after effects and i have brought them in to after effects from illustrator as after effects shape layers and the first thing i'm going to do before i do anything is to re-label my layers to the sounds that they make so i'll go ahead and do that real quick okay so now that i have everything labeled i'm going to select all my layers and go to the align panel here and make sure that align layers to composition is selected and i will align everything to the center vertical and center horizontal now everything will be on top of each other and you'll notice that i have this ruler up here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to set this ruler right at the top of the top lip because when your jaw opens and closes actually just the lower part of your jaw that moves up and down the top part of your jaw actually stays pretty stationary so i'm going to align the top part of the jaw on all my layers to this line so that they all align correctly [Music] okay so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select all my layers and i'm going to hit alt right bracket to make them all one frame and also you want to make sure that the composition you're doing this in is less than 100 frames so i just have my composition set to one second which at a frame rate of 12 frames per second is 12 frames far underneath the 100 frame limit now the next couple of steps are very important that you do it this way the first thing is you want to select the top layer first and then while holding shift select your bottom layer this tells after effects to select it in this order we want to select it from the top down and the reason why is that when we go to keyframe assistant and we go to sequence layers hit ok it's going to sequence it downwards if we were to grab the bottom layer hold shift and grab the top layer it would sequence the layers upwards like that which we don't want so now that we have it all sequenced we can preview it looks good and the last thing i'm gonna do is i have just a normal 1920x1080 composition i'm just going to adjust that size down to 200 by 200 because i don't need all that extra space that looks good now everything inside this composition is set up perfectly all we have to do now is jump over to our main composition where we have the head artwork and we'll just drag the mouth in here and position it okay that looks pretty good maybe i want to just make it a little bit smaller that looks pretty good and the next part is the easiest part of this whole process you select your mouth composition go over to sf caddy hit load items and boom now sfcaddy has loaded all the different layers the poses that we made in the previous composition and it's used the name of the layer as the title of each of these poses so we know what we're doing and then from here all i have to do is go to the frame that i want to switch to to and click on that new pose okay and then obviously you just go through your audio and switch these poses to the ones you want adds these little hold keyframes and that's a little slow so i'll just speed that up i just wanted to highlight a few of the things you can do with this panel here the first thing is you'll see that it took the name of the layers inside the composition but let's say i wanted to change one of these or maybe i mislabeled something instead of going back into this composition re-labeling that layer and then coming back here to reload all the items i can actually just hold ctrl and click on one of these panels it will bring up this text box and then i can just rename that now it has the new name the other thing too is i have more mouth poses than i can see here and of course i could scroll down but i don't want to have to scroll down every time so i can use this to resize everything so that everything is viewable so i have access to all my different mouth poses here and now i don't need to use any scrolling that just saves me time and is a lot easier to use obviously and the last thing is i can actually change the background color of these buttons maybe to make it easier to see now this gray is pretty good for my particular background but just to demonstrate this you can bring up the settings and you can change the background color to whatever you want and now that is changed so that's useful in case you're using maybe certain colors that are hard to see against the gray background you can choose a color that makes it easier on your eyes so there you go that's about it and i don't know about you but i'm excited to use this tool in my future projects well that does it for this video thanks for watching if you found that this video was helpful hit that like button below and if you want to get sf caddy for yourself you can get it in the link below if you want more content like this in the future make sure you are subscribed and make sure you have that bell icon activated thanks again for watching and we'll see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Keyframe Academy

Views: 151,699

Keywords: character animation, after effects, 2d animation, mouth rig after effects, mouth rig duik, mouth rig joysticks and sliders, character animation after effects 2020, after effects tutorial, character animation after effects tutorial, lip syncing, lip sync after effects, motion graphics after effects tutorial, motion graphics animation, character design, motion graphics after effects showreel, mouth rig, lip sync after effects tutorial, motion graphics video, motion graphics

Id: yX0vL9hsn7c

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020