Moho Animation Forum

I have never animated speech/dialogue. Is there a consensus among animators who use switch layers for mouth shapes of what the bare minimum you should have? I am making a retro type character with a limited animation look and I don't want or need an elaborate collection of mouth shapes. I did a search and didn't find what I was looking for. It seems like I saw a list somewhere where the "rest position" was used for some phonemes along with a few other poses. Any help would be appreciated.

Well, I think the absolute minimum (seen on some very cheap anime etc) is "open" and "closed". A good compromise is seven phonemes -- see Cartoon Solutions. That should be enough for retro-style stuff...
If you're going to be doing a lot of this, try learning Papagayo.

Dermot O' Connor describes a system that uses only 6 shapes: tutorial-3 : dialog

That said, you'd be surprised how convincing lip synch can work with only 2 shapes of open and closed (eg., The Muppets). Plus if you ever want variants of whispering, yelling, happy, angry, sad, etc. it's a lot easier if you have only a few phonemes.

I think happy, sad, open, closed, and 'O' are the bare minimum, unless you are a Muppet.

Thankyou for the replies