I had assumed there must be tons free character and mouth packs on the net, but alas I could only find 2. The first pack is totally free, and was used by Michael James Williams in his review of SmartMouth. The second pack is free when you sign up for a newsletter from Cartoon Solutions (who also offer several commercial character packs).

Given this total lack of free pre-built mouth shapes, I put together a simple Flash file that you can download for free, which contains the basic phonemes (mouth shapes). The file is compatible back to Flash Pro CS3.

Custom Mouth Shapes

It’s not as difficult as you might think to create the mouth shapes required make a character speak. Once you have the mouth shapes, you can leverage the power of the Graphic symbol. There are several great video tutorials online for building characters that talk, like this one from Chris Georgenes. Chris and I also covered this topic in depth in Animation with Scripting (available from: Peachpit | Amazon | Adobe Press).

If mouth shapes and character packs are something you’d like to see more of on our site or within our products, please let us know in the comments.

Voices: Betsie Bush and Peter Yearsley (librivox.org)
Music: Baby, Please Don’t Go by Big Bill Broonzy

We don’t have an exact release date available. I’m hoping it will be in the next 1-3 months. The SmartMouthRT SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) will be priced to reflect its greater flexibility beyond that of the Flash Extension. The first release will analyze essentially any (and all) sound playing within the Flash Player. Future releases will likely include the ability to target specific sound objects (i.e., for multiple simultaneous characters) as well as microphone objects.

Want an email when SmartMouthRT is available? Subscribe to our newsletter.

In this video, Supervisor Animator, Allison Craig shows off the Facinator tool that I built for Titmouse:

Since the folks at Titmouse rendered their 2-D characters from every conceivable angle, they asked me to build a tool to rotate the detailed 2-D heads in 3-D space. You can see this in action starting at the 1 minute mark.

The 1st episode of Motorcity airs this Monday, but you can see it early (for free) on iTunes.

Source: Cold Hard Flash

Additionally, Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker, aka voice of the Joker) does a fantastic job voicing the villain.

Earlier this year, Cold Hard Flash interviewed the head of Titmouse about opening an east coast office. Chris P, the interviewee, gives a shout-out to Ben Kalina, the fantastic producer with whom I’ve been working. In addition to producing Motorcity, Titmouse has also taken over production of the Venture Bros. (one of our favorite cartoons), for which I also had the privilege of creating a production tool.

I recommend checking out Motorcity (and the new Venture Bros., when the season airs). Kudos to the talent people at Titmouse!

UPDATE (4/27): Cold Hard Flash just posted a story about Motorcity and Titmouse’s animation pipeline which includes a video preview of one of the tools that I built called Facinator.

How it Works

It works in most ways like the selection tool: you can click to select, double-click to edit, but you can also scrub-slide through graphic symbol frames.

You can even scrub through loop settings (using the Alt/Opt key).

Features

• Click and drag to update the first frame that is displayed.
• Hold SHIFT to cycle through frames faster.
• Hold ALT (OPT on Mac) to cycle through loop settings (Loop, Play Once, Single Frame).
• Hold CTRL (CMD on Mac) to temporarily revert to the Selection Tool.

Download

(compatibility: CS3 and newer, Flash 8 & MX 2004 untested)
FrameScrub.mxp

Installation

Open the MXP file in Extension Manager, follow the steps, and restart Flash. If you don’t see the FrameScrub in your toolbar (behind the selection tool), you can add it by accessing Edit (Flash on Mac) > Customize Tools Panel… Select a tool position, locate FrameScrub in the list on the left and use the right-facing arrow button to add FrameScrub to the selected tool position.

Other Lip Sync Tools from Ajar Productions

• SmartMouth
• FrameSync

I’ll continue to collect them, if you have custom eases or tutorials to share (on easing), you can post them in the comments below or send them directly to us.

The basic version of EaseCaddy is still totally free. By upgrading to the Pro version, you’ll be able to apply an ease to multiple tweens (motion and/or classic) simultaneously.

You can find more information about the new version of EaseCaddy on the product page.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the new version, you should see a button at the bottom of the SmartMouth panel that says Advanced…

New Advanced Features

The Advanced button will bring up a window with 2 new options.

Looping

Loop settings allow you to control the loop setting applied to the outputted symbol instance(s). This can be applied if you want to animate each mouth shape, rather than use static images.

Keyframe Frequency

Keyframe Frequency allows you to control the frequency of keyframes that are automatically generated (1s – every frame, 2s – every other frame, or 3s – every third frame). You can use this setting to animate your mouth at a frame rate lower than that of the rest of your animation. For example, your animation might be set to 30 fps, but you want your mouth to animate at 15 fps, so that the mouth doesn’t look frantic. In this case, you could select 2s.

The image below demonstrates the different outputs generated by altering the Keyframe Frequency.

These new features are based on user requests. Please let us know what you think!

Dave Logan has a wonderful command called Enter Graphic At Current Frame that resolves this issue. Many Flash animators use graphics symbols  so much that they would prefer “entering at the current frame” to be Flash’s default behavior when they double-click to edit a symbol. A number of these users have sent me requests through the Extension Request Form. So I put together this panel to essentially make “entering at the current frame” the default behavior. The panel simply has to be open for the behavior to work (the Auto jump box is checked by default). There are some extra buttons for some added fanciness.

This is a total freebie, but donations are appreciated (donate button located in the right-hand column).

Download
(Compatibility: Flash 8 & up)
FrameAim.mxp

Note: When I tested this in Flash CS5 (Mac) it ran perfectly. In CS3, not so much. So use with caution. Same goes for Convert to 2s. I’m not sure where the discrepancy comes from, looks like a Flash bug, but I’ll fix it if I can.

Download
(Compatibility: MX 2004 & up)

Convert to Ns.mxp