How to make my 3D character make funny faces and talk?

This tutorial will show you how to animate a character's face, in order to perform facial acting in movies. (This tutorial assumes that a scene is already created, and a character is added.)

1. Learning the facial animation interface

After you add a character, right click on the character or select it followed by [Space] to bring up character radial menu. Click on the [character animation] button to access the animation tools.

In the [Character Animation Interface] window there are two tabs, [facial animation] and [body animation]. We will concentrate on the [facial animation] for now, as it deals with the facial acting of the character. The [face] section in the top left corner shows the current face of the selected character showing all the customisable facial features. Left click on the features such as left eye, right eye, left brow, right brow and mouth to see the available expressions in the [variations] section on the right. Left click on the left eye for now.

NOTE: The 'left' eye is on the right side.  It's just like looking into a mirror.

2. Animating the face

Left clicking on different variations of the left eye and the result is instantly updated on the character face.

Tip: Left click on one of the eye brow now, press [Shift] + left click on an variation to change the opposite feature, which in this case is the right eye brow. This is useful for making mirror features to look the same, in this case, eye brows and eyes.

3. Saving/loading facial expressions

At the bottom left of the window is [expressions], this is where new facial features can be saved and loaded. Play around with the character's face, once you have something you like, give it a name and left click on the [store] button in [expressions]. The saved expressions would show up below ready for later use. Try saving a few more.

To load the faces you have saved, left click on them, and see the results. You can delete the saved expressions by mouse-over the expression then press [Delete].

Tip: try to save a lot of the facial expressions that you've used, it's very likely that you will come back to them from time to time.

The [export face to bitmap] button lets you export the created face to a [png] file so you can use it in other applications, like instant messengers and forums. Left click [add to timeline] adds the current face to the main timeline. 

If the facial animation is successfully added to the timeline, you will see this icon  appear on the timeline.

4. Lipsync animations

Left clicking on [add speech to timeline] to add a lipsync animation. This allows you to animate the character's mouth to a particular sentence within a particular timeframe.--

Upon clicking the button, a dialogue box opens:

• Sentence to lipsync – type a line of dialogue for the character to speak.

• Mouth-shape refine – can type heavier accented words to refine the dialogue, ie. “da” for “the” accentuate the lip shapes.

• Duration – duration of the spoken dialogue in seconds.

• Avg. Pause – the average pause between words in a sentence.

Click on [Add To Timeline] to add the speech animation to timeline. It pays to preview the lipsyncing a few times to get it right.

If speech is successfully added to the timeline, you will see this icon appear in the timeline.

After facial expressions and speeches have been added to the timeline, click the play button on the timeline to watch them in full effect. For details on the timeline, refer to tutorial 8 - Timeline Controls.

Note: lipsyncing animations only deal with mouth animations, so if the speech animations happen at the same time as face animations on the timeline, the mouth animations will follow the speech animations, everything else are determined by the face animations.

Save your scene for now and we'll discuss how to manipulate facial animations in the timeline later.

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