Question Audio speech with character.

[Aminator]

Im doing scenes that are mainly 3 or 4 minutes long with lots of talking.
So far the process I've been using is to make an audio dialog track and make a trigger on frame one of the acidbubbles timeline and using lipsync.
Then in the VAM timeline I set a trigger to play the whole animation.

Is this a good way to do it? The whole scene is basically one track.

The main problem I'm noticing is that I can't make the timeline large enough to edit the keyframes. It's like trying to fix a pocket watch with mittens on. It's especially hard trying to fix the mouth so it closes completely for "P" or "B" sounds.

Should I be making smaller tracks and having them play consecutively?

 

[atani]

You can zoom in if you if you grab and move horizontally the percentage area above the scrubber. Not sure if that's the right name, the animation time section, and there's a 100% above it, that's the "zooming" section.

I don't know if that's a good way to do what you're doing, it depends. If it's working then I guess it's good, right?
Perhaps an advice is to break that single animation into smaller sequential ones. This should give you more room to work and fix or change things.

Good luck

 

[Aminator]

You can zoom in if you if you grab and move horizontally the percentage area above the scrubber. Not sure if that's the right name, the animation time section, and there's a 100% above it, that's the "zooming" section.

I don't know if that's a good way to do what you're doing, it depends. If it's working then I guess it's good, right?
Perhaps an advice is to break that single animation into smaller sequential ones. This should give you more room to work and fix or change things.

Good luck

I haven't had a chance to try it yet but if I can zoom in on the track that'll be a real help. Im surprised I never discovered it by accident.

I guess the only concern is if it makes a difference for timing. I need the timing of the animation and audio to be the same every time I play it so it matches up with real world things I wanna do.
Im finally close to completing a scene.
Thanks for the tip!

 

[atani]

There's also 2 modes in Timeline: real time and unity time; this might be important?

I never did something to match a song time, won't be of much help here. The only suggestion is to check on similar content from creators and see what they did and used.

 

[ZRSX]

I need the timing of the animation and audio to be the same every time I play it so it matches up with real world things I wanna do.

Audio sync is coming up in the next Timeline version. That should cover exactly what you're looking for.

You can subscribe to AcidBubble's Patreon to have access to the Alpha or way a little for public release.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Thanks for the tag @ZRSX ! Indeed there are two features that will help; audio scrubbing which means you can scrub and hear the audio, and if you play halfway the audio will start at the right time; and the other feature is the ability to link a Timeline animation directly to an audio source time, which guarantees audio sync.

Real (clock) time is a good way to have a better sync in the current version since the Game (Unity) time actually slows down when the CPU cannot keep up with the physics rate. That should already help.

Finally, Timeline has a zoom feature that you can use (already in Hub), and in the top-right corner you can expand the dope sheet to see things a little bit better. Usually I rely a lot on the keyboard to navigate frames though (using Keybindings)

Hope that helps! Timeline 6 should be released in the near future but you should be able to achieve something without it in the meantime too