Character Animation

832 Kevin Phillips | Character Animation | Beginner Swing Your Head Turns Next time you animate a head turning from one side to another by simply rotating it left or right, consider doing this to make the head turn a little more natural and interesting: Scrub the frame slider to halfway between the head turn keyframes. Rotate the head down on its pitch slightly and create a key. The extra key where the head dips slightly downward will add a subtle amount of swing to the head as it turns, giving it a more natural feel. Versions: All
Note: Unless your character is cautiously turning its head in fear, don’t turn a character’s head too slowly. Consider using between four (fast) to ten (slow) frames as a good basis for a turn of the head.
Note: Don’t forget that when we turn our heads, we often subconsciously blink. 833 Kevin Phillips | Character Animation | Beginner Body First, Lip Sync Last Lip sync is regarded almost as a secondary motion to character animation. You should strive to animate the character’s body language to match your dialog before adding your lip sync. If your character animation doesn’t feel like it works without seeing the mouth movement, you should review your animation. Versions: All 834 Larry Shultz | Character Animation | Intermediate to Advanced Speeding Up Lip Sync Sometimes when doing lip sync things can appear to slow down or the audio becomes choppy. Here are a few tips I use to help things along:  Have Play at Exact Rate checked.  Resample the audio down to the lowest rate possible that is still intelligible.  Lower the SubPatch level on the characters.  Do the lip sync for each character in its own scenes and load them into the main scene later.  Cut off the head, animate the lip sync, and then paste the head back onto the body later.  Render out preview anims that include the audio in the finished movie file. Versions: All