Hello,
Working on something for a personal project, and figured if there was any need of it, I could sell it on the marketplace. That is, unless there’s already some much easier way to do this and I never saw it.
The idea is this is a blueprint that acts as a mouth for 2d animation. You import your mouth images, create sprites of them, then assign those sprites to the MouthFlaps Blueprint, along with assigning the phonemes (language sound) each mouth image takes care of. Dialogue is kept in a data table, which is where you break down lines into sentences, words, and finally phonemes each word is made up of. You enter the time each word or section starts and ends, and the blueprint auto spreads the phonemes assigned in that time range. You can also specify your own timing for phonemes in words that might drag in certain syllables. It’s better explained with a setup video, but that’s not what this post is for.
Basically, once you have the blueprint set up for a character with some dialogue, importing and assigning new dialogue is quick. You can add a new sentence ready to go in minutes.
Here’s an example of it in action. I drew the mouth images for this myself and recorded my voice. If you can’t tell, I’m no artist. But you can get the idea.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NNFM2QfD1XY
I used a third party audio program to get the time each word starts and ends, but you can do the same thing using sequencer and adding in your sound file. So this entire process, after you’ve imported your mouth images, can be done in-engine.