Adding a lip-sync to your animation is essential to making your characters seem alive. However, it is also a particularly tedious part of the animation process.
To solve this problem, Harmony provides an automatic lip-sync detection feature. This feature analyzes the content of a sound track in your scene and associates each phoneme it detects with one of the mouth shapes in the following mouth chart, which is a standard mouth chart in the animation industry.
This is an approximation of the English phonemes each mouth shape can be used to represent:
- A: m, b, p, h
- B: s, d, j, i, k, t
- C: e, a
- D: A, E
- E: o
- F: u, oo
- G: f, ph
- X: Silence, undetermined sound
When performing automatic lip-sync detection, Harmony does not create mouth drawings. It simply fills the drawing column of your character's mouth layer with the generated lip-sync, by inserting the letter associated with the right mouth shape into each cell of the column. Therefore, for the automatic lip-sync detection to work, your character's mouth layer should already contain a mouth drawing for each drawing in the mouth chart, and these drawings should be named by their corresponding letter.