"A viseme is a generic facial image that can be used to indicate a particular sound. A viseme is the visual equivalent of a phoneme or unit of sound in spoken language. Visemes and phonemes do not necessarily share a one-to-one correspondence. Often several phonemes correspond to a single viseme, as several phonemes look the same on the face....
...[The] Visemes, are determined by audio. Visemes are visualizations of key mouth positions when saying common phonetic sounds. Character Animator listens for 60+ specific sounds and translates them into visemes."
The following is "Getting Started in Adobe Character Animator CC" from Dave Werner (Okay Samurai)
The following is a video from Dave Werner on Multiple takes
Things to cover:
To edit the puppet from Character Animator, you can click on the puppet and choose: Edit > Edit Original
If that doesn't work, you can open Illustrator, and choose:
File > Open...
then, find the file under Documents/Adobe/Character Animator/Character Animator Project/Ch Media/Gathered Media
then, double click on "Chloe.ai"
The puppet's Illustrator/Photoshop layers are labeled with specific names to import/work in Character Animator
The plus in the layer name indicates that that layer will move independently (it will not warp surrounding elements)
In Character animator, there are multiple views ("Start", "Rig", "Record", "Stream")
To see Chloe's rig, double click on her puppet. Then click on any of her body parts.
In record mode, use the "Set Rest Pose" to calibrate your facial expressions and head movements to drive the puppet
Make a recording by pressing on the record button
Instead of recording your audio live in Character Animator, you can import an audio file:
File > Import...
Select your file in the Browser
Drag the audio file onto the timeline
Timeline > Compute Lip Sync From Scene Audio
Record different "takes" and select the red buttons on the right to indicate what you want to record
Trigger different hands with the number keys
Adjust "Playback and Recording Speed"
Set the length of your video by clicking on "Scene" in the Project Panel. Then on the right-hand side, change the "Duration"
Exporting as a video to upload to YouTube:
File > Export > Video via Adobe Media Encoder...
Choose a file location
Media Encoder should open
You might have to adjust the location of where the file is being exported
Press the green play arrow button to "Start Queue"
As you are working, your project will be saved to Documents/Adobe/Character Animator/Character Animator Project/
Your supporting files will be within that directory
5. How to Upload to YouTube
Once you've exported an mp4 file, you can upload it to YouTube and create a link in your learning journal. The following link provides instructions (and a video) on how to upload a video to YouTube.
Modify the Chloe puppet in Photoshop. Change the hair color, shape of one body part, and color of her clothing.
Run a vocal sound wave through Character Animator (duration will be a minimum of 15 seconds and a maximum of 60 second). This could be your vocals recorded from either of the previous Audition labs or a new recording that you want to make in this lab.
Animate the puppet by adding:
eye movements
eyebrow movements
head movements
left and right arm movements
7.1 Your submission:
Add an entry into your learning journal. Your submission should contain:
A heading for Lab 7 and a brief description of what tool was used and what you did (i.e. for this lab, it might be something like Lab 7: Character Animator)
One image of your final Character Animator work environment with all the layers(use Command-Shift-4 and space on a mac to take a snapshot of your Character Animator window)
A link to your finished animation that you've uploaded to YouTube.
A learning journal entry which might contain any or all of the following: a description of what you've learned, challenges faced, any YouTube videos or tutorials that you found useful, any credits for content that you got from "open source", and anything that you might want to remember about what you've done for the future.
7.2 Mark Distribution
Lab 1 through 11 will be marked based on:
learning journal in Adobe Spark (3 marks)
this mark will be based on the description of what has been learned, any problems encountered, and solutions found
if nothing (or barely anything) is indicated, then the mark will be zero or one
if there is a good documentation on learning, then the mark will be two or three
exercise submission (5 marks)
3 marks will be given for following the exercise precisely
to get 4 or 5 marks, the submission will have to use innovation and substitutions of bits and pieces (outside of the box of what was taught). If you get a 5, that means that you have WOW'ed me
