Mastering Character Animations - jMonkeyEngine 3.0 - page 214

Lip syncing and facial expressions
This recipe handles two important parts of making characters seem alive and sentient.
Technically, they can be handled using AnimChannel , but they still deserve their own
mention as they have some special requirements.
Lip syncing revolves around something called Phoneme , which is the distinct shape the
mouth takes when making certain sounds. The number of phonemes a character has varies
according to different needs, but there is a basic set that is used to create believable mouth
movements.
Finally, we'll use jMonkeyEngine's Cinematics system to apply them in sequence and have
the character speak (mime) a word. Cinematics is jMonkeyEngine's scripting system, and it
can be used both to create in-game-scripted events and cutscenes. It is covered in more
depth in Chapter 9 , Taking Our Game to the Next Level .
We'll follow the control pattern in this recipe, and control can be merged into another anim-
ation controller or be kept alone.