I’m working on facial animation using shape keys in Blender 2.61. I’m lip syncing the character to song audio. Repetitive stuff like the chorus seems like it would be good to make into actions, but I can’t figure out how to do it. The action editor doesn’t seem to show any shape keys, and if I copy the keyframes for the lyric sequence from the dopesheet and then try to paste them into a new action it throws an error about no f-curves selected or something.
I can copy and paste the keyframes from within the dopesheet, but I have to search back to find the keyframe sequence’s beginning and end then go back and paste. Seems like this should be easier. Can anyone help with how to do this?
Hi Sago, yeah I used the shape key editor initially to create the lip sync animations. I used shape keys for the mouth shape phonemes like W, O, E etc. that the lips/jaw make when speaking. Then I made word/line animations from those. But the song has a lot of repeated phrases. For instance, the phrase “I know I’m gonna be” is repeated throughout the whole song. Instead of copying & pasting the keyframes for that sequence over and over in the dopesheet, I’m just wondering if there is a way to save that collection of keyframes as its own action and just call it from the later frames where the phrase occurs again in the song
yeah I could use the NLA editor, but I want to be able to tweak the shape keys sliders and keyframe positions if I need to. The phrase “I know I’m gonna be” occurs many times but has slightly different inflection & timing each time. If I’m not mistaken, making a strip for the NLA editor bakes the animation. What I’d really like is to be able to select all the keyframes for a phrase or word in the dopesheet and save them in a way similar to the way vertex groups are made. So for that phrase I’d save it as ‘IknowImGonBe’. Then when the phrase occurs again, just select that from a list to have the keyframes pasted there.
EDIT:
OK I got it. You were right about only needing the ShapeKey editor from within the DopeSheet. There’s a couple of tricks to get it working right. To paste keyframes into new actions, the shape keys in the target action must be initialized first with any value even though you will likely be pasting over that key frame. That solves the ‘no F-curve selected’ error. Then for the individual word or phrase actions, they need to be unlinked by hitting F to save & X to unlink. Then use a master action that remains linked to build out the full animation.
Check out this tutorial, but do the steps in the ShapeKey Editor and when it says to set a keyframe, do so with the shape key slider instead:
This way you can build out a shape key animation library for words & phrases that might be used often by a particular character.