Copying Visemes between Characters?

[SharonfromMD]

I think this question was asked a year or two ago. Can you copy visemes from one character to another?  If so, how?

-Sharon

[KJerryK]

You can copy/paste visemes -- select the visemes and lip sync, then Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+V (or the equivalent on a mac). If you are pasting them to another scene you may also want to add the audio.

[SharonfromMD]

One at a time or in a group? It seems to me I’m having trouble selecting them. I’m not at my computer to try it now but I will later. Thanks

Sent from my iPhone

[KJerryK]

I just drag the cursor over them all, click Ctrl+C, then select the puppet I want to paste to and click Ctrl+V. I haven't used this feature, except to see if it works, because the visemes are tied to the particular audio and I usually want different audio for different puppets. So I'd be interested in how you plan to use it.

[SharonfromMD]

I am not able to simply select the visemes and copy and paste. If I put the cursor on it, it simply puts a white line on it and I cannot simply drag across like I can with behaviors. It drags the visemes. So either it's not possible, or I'm doing something wrong in the selection.

The reason I need it is because I create children's songs. I have different characters singing at different times. I do not want to have to break up the music (that would be very difficult, time consuming, and perhaps impossible to really get correctly). I want to break up the visemes. These are more accurate than recording in my facial expressions, but if I have to I will do that.

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

I could not work out how to copy and paste individual visemes either. I can select them, but "Edit/Copy" in the menu is disabled.

I could copy and paste a full lipsync take. Just single click on the bar above the visemes (e.g. the bar in blue in the screenshot below), go to the menu and select Edit/Copy, then click on the other puppet (e.g. "Liana REAR" in the screen shot) then select "Edit/Paste" from the menu. (Control-C and Control-V are the same thing). That is however copying the whole take (with all the visemes in the take).

You can adjust the length of the take however (to hide the stuff you don't want). I tried to do "Edit/Split" on the lipsync take to chop it up into smaller parts to copy:

It sort of worked, but if I stretch out the take again it becomes clear split just cloned the take and trimmed the endings (everything in the take is still there!). That is probably not a problem in practice.

So maybe you need to split your lipsync takes, then copy the take and paste that into the other puppet. Hopefully that is close enough to what you need.

(I would have thought you could copy/paste visemes, but I could not get it to work either when I tried. I can select a subset of visemes by dragging out a rectangle to cover them (see screenshot), but then all I could do was move them sideways or delete them. "Edit/copy" is disabled in the menu, so it looks like its not supported.)

[KJerryK]

It actually is possible to copy/paste the visemes on just part of a take. It's kind of counter-intuitive, and takes a few extra steps. You need to drag the take to show only what you want to cut and paste. This screen cap demonstrates --

[SharonfromMD]

Thank you alank. At least this gives me a work around. I have songs with two voices-a boy and girl, that alternate and sometimes sing together. Between the highlighting and splitting, I have a work around.

FYI-for those that are working with this- I have 10 characters. I'm choosing the character that has the easiest defineable lip motions and creating the visemes separately at the end of my piece before I put them into the actual animation. In other words, I'm going to edit the visemes and then take parts of them and paste them. (It's not actually going to be a part, I suspect it will copy the entire thing, but I should be able to delete what's not needed.)

I personally find having the computer compute the lip syncs is the most effective-I'm not in a room that is bright. I try to use a take that has no orchestration on it-it only has the voice parts. This makes it more accurate. Still, there are always too many visemes, so I end up cutting a lot of them. The slow playback feature is very helpful.

[alank99101739]

Yes. So I think what it does is copy/paste the whole take then you trim it to the subset you want. (That is, I think it’s because you also had the take selected, not because you selected vizemes in the take). The “split” menu item seems to do the same thing, duplicate the whole take and then trim the two takes.