Facial Motion and Controls - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 173

Mouth Shapes for Lip Syncing

A quick search of the Internet will reveal that everyone has their own ideas about how many mouth shapes you
need to effectively lip sync your character to your dialog. In the end, it comes down to the same thing as so many
other details of your animation: the style. If the style is simple and cartoony, you can probably make do with only
a few shapes for lip sync (open mouth, closed mouth, wide mouth, and “oooo” lips). The more realistic your ani-
mation becomes, the more closely you will have to match the shapes that would actually be needed to make the
sounds coming from your character's mouths.

Creating shapes for lip syncing works exactly like making any other kind of expressions, although you will
probably not want to divide them into separate left and right components.

Figures 10.25 and 10.26 show the mouth shapes for both the Beast and the mother characters, along with the
sounds that they are capable of representing.

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Figure 10.25 The mouth shapes for the mother