I’ve had a couple of people write me about pre-built mouth shapes for use with SmartMouth. SmartMouth is built with the principle of flexibility in mind, so it relies on the content created by the animator. Since receiving inquiries about pre-built mouth shapes, I’ve given more thought to the wide range of people using SmartMouth, from professional animators in studios, to less-experienced users seeking an easy way to add character animation to their projects.
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.
Ever since our SmartMouth auto-lipsyncing Flash extension was released, people have been asking about lipsyncing in real time…Well, we’re getting pretty close to having such a product ready for purchase. SmartMouthRT is an easy-to-use ActionScript 3 library that allows for on-the-fly lipsyncing. With Adobe’s packaging utilities for Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad), SmartMouthRT could easily be used for mobile apps as well. We’ve put a little demo video together to show you what it’s all about, which includes behind-the-scenes footage of the assets and code used to make the demo.
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.
Now that Titmouse’s new series Motorcity (mentioned in the previous post) is about to air, they’re sharing some behind-the-scenes magic.
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.
I’ve had the great privilege over the last year to work on some fun projects building production tools for Titmouse. I’m excited to say that the series they’ve been working on, Motorcity, will begin airing 1 week from today on Disney XD. You can also download an early preview of the first episode (for free) on iTunes. It’s action packed!
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.
This is the first video in a series on digital literacy. The goal of this video is to provide an overview of HTML and Flash technologies, primarily for non-technical viewers. Future videos may cover aspects of these technologies in more depth and provide a foundation for deciding when to use each technology.
Introducing FrameScrub, the lip-syncing tool for those who want to go panel-less.
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.
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.
On a few occasions, I’ve had to open Flash CS5.5 files on a machine with CS5. Since the FLA format is now XML- and ZIP-based, it’s relatively easy to unzip the package, open a file, and set the version back so that the file can be opened in Flash CS5. It does, however, take time. So I decided to make this process into an easy-to-use desktop application.
Usage
Just drag and drop a Flash CS5.5 FLA file onto Flannel and it will make a copy and append _CS5 to the file name. That file can be opened in Flash CS5. Conversion for CS4 is a little trickier, since several new elements were added for CS5, but I’m working on it.
Installation
You can install Flannel using the badge below.
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
Or you can download the file directly Flannel.air (Adobe AIR is required).
Flannel is available at no cost, but donations are welcome.
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.
