That's a neat way of doing mouth animation/lip syncing. Looks awesome! I also am intrigued by the synopsis you gave for your new film. I'm looking forward to the updates. Best of luck, Sloth.

Once you really start jumping into lots of transitional faces you start to wind up with a lot of the same issues that the Liquify method has, if the expression does not jump directly to the next sound the actor is making the whole thing begins to look muddy and does not seem as in sync with the actual dialog, I am also limiting myself to official LEGO face prints, which makes it a bit harder to get all the expressions you need for the full range of speech.

I am not going for realism here, unless trying to make it look like LEGO is realism, which is my goal, I want the face to look like a real LEGO face, I feel like a lot of the lip sync other people are doing is removing the reality from the stop motion, putting it almost to a point were it is CGI, which is not my goal. Ideally I would like people to think I just replaced heads on the minifig and have a bunch that they just don't have, and I worked within those limitations, it might be an artistic goal you don't like or agree with, that that is the direction I am pushing towards.

As Pritchard said, the face seems too large. Not only the mouth, but the entire face. If you'll notice on a real LEGO Minifigure, the eyes on every minifigure are in the exact same spot. The mouth usually never reaches below the flat part of the minifigure's head (though, lips and chin elements can go below), and the eyebrows usually stay right at the top of the flat part.

Though, I like the idea of the lip syncing, and it loos pretty cool so far.

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RioForce, while I agree that the face may be slightly to large the mouth I'm using for A-I-L does in fact go onto the curved part of the face, I did go over it once more and realize maybe one or two single frame transitional expressions were called for.

Nathan, all the faces were photographed with a 105mm lens to make them as flat as I could get them, I'll upload the images I have later if anyone is interested in using them. The main digital modification was erasing the yellow, sadly I photographed them at a little to low of a resolution so I may want to retake the pictures but getting all the elements in for one gender is a full days work.

Last night I did an animation for this dialog where the girl is drunk and unsteady, sadly I was rushing to get it done before bed and it is out of focus,  but I am still going to try and track the head and see how it looks, if I can tack an out of focus un steady head I sold be able to do anything.

Wonderful! I look forward to the files. I definitely want to try my own hand at experimenting with this!

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Really interesting way of doing face animation, I can't wait to see how it develops.

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Welp, I tried to do motion tracking without adding any tracking point to the face and it did not turn out well, I don't know if you can tell but I added a few transitional frames  to the mouth movements on really big changes, I think I need to retry the whole think with some tracking points. While I could do all the 3D movement in AE by hand I think that will be WAY to time consuming and I think tracking points with a few touch ups by hand might do the trick, although I do feel like this was about 10x harder to track then most situations would be as the minifig was drunk. Due to how disastrous it turned out I have not put much work into fixing other failures it contains.

HoldingOurOwn did you even watch my test? The mouths in Clutch Cargo are about as far from what I want my lip sync to look like as possible.

Nathan: I think I may retake all the face pictures as I do have a few issues (like the lower resolution among other things) that I can fix if I start over. But here is a download of the current PNG face pieces with transparency. I took the pieces from these faces:

Edit: Trying some new tracking markers, movie making is fun

That looks much better! Did you only have two tracking markers? I like the new transitional faces.

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

rioforce: AE can only use 2 tracking points so I used it's positioning data and adjusted the tilt and rotation by hand, if you watch it a lot and critically you can start to see the tracking flaws but they aren't that obvious on first viewing.