Facial Motion Capture Dialogue Critique

calllum

I've been working on clean up and adding to this animation for a little while now and was hoping people could give me some critique on lip sync and general movement of it.
we used Cara Facial Motion Capture for this assignment (university).
I was one of the luckier ones with how the data turned out but its still required a fair amount of clean up.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/142529#166371

This was the reference used though we had to have a voice actor for the animation:
https://youtu.be/sdWrdJb0KWU?t=23s

Hito

I was trying to figure out what she's saying earlier. Helps a lot now that I know. The overall timing feels fairly close, delay the audio by a frame and check the timing, then one more frame and check again. I think the audio needs to be  around 2 frames later.

The other thing is the head tilt back in the mocap feels out of sync with the jaw open/close. In the ref video her head tilt is very closely matched with jaw: head furthest back when jaw is fully open, head tilt leads by a couple frames for "kick your teeth in." In the mocap the head is slightly behind the jaw open, so it feels like she's hitting an invisible barrier that forces her head to till back when she opens her mouth too wide.

consider the mechanics of the head tilt, it's to maximize opening of the wind pipe to maximize sound volume, so the head tilt needs to slightly lead or coordinate with jaw opening, especially for the vowels. The overall head movement is a combination of head tilt back and neck tilting forward, again to maximize wind pipe opening. It's part thrusting forward part tilting back, a distinctly different movement than just the head tilt back like looking up. This doesn't feel like it's coming through in the mocap.

calllum

Thanks for the feedback, delaying by 2 frames seems to work for the majority of the dialogue but throws of the starting "we", 1 frame seems to work ok. I'll try pushing the the head movements forwards a bit and fit them to the jaw a bit more. Thanks.

Hito

I forgot to mention, if at all possible, split the jaw and lip movements to separate passes. Nail the head + jaw before adding lips to the mix.

calllum

my animation course has finished so the link to the final render for this animation is below, there was still stuff I missed but I think it was an alright attempt.
Thanks for the help with this.

https://youtu.be/xejG57d0q8I