Animating with Blender

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 animation 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 ...