Hey there, I've been using FaceFX for a little while now and seem to be having an issue that I haven't noticed before. I have character setup with the nine default phonetic blend shapes, plus one additional shape. As I am going through dialog lines and trying to refine the mapped values, I've noticed that when I adjust the values for any phoneme, they aren't reflected in the animation curves. For example, when I change the influence of the open mouth shape for the "D" phoneme from 0.35 to 0.12, it has zero effect on the animation curves. The mouth still opens as it did before.
Even more strange I've tried editing values for other phonemes that aren't in the phoneme editor and it will affect the animation curves. In an area where there is "silence", I can adjust the open influence on "T" and it will affect my curves in that region. This happens even if there is no "T" phoneme in the area. It is almost as if the phoneme editor is not showing me the correctly active phonemes. Am I missing something?
You can get the results you expect if you turn off "Tools->Use New Coarticulation"
The New Coarticulation algorithm attempts to remove as many phonemes as possible for a smoother animation, and to do that it manipulates the phoneme list behind the scenes. One of the things it does is convert phonemes like T,L,D to T so that it can combine them with neighboring phonemes.
Turning off New Coarticulation will result in a "busier" mouth, but you will be able to see how the curves relate to the phoneme list via the mapping.
Awesome, thank you for the response. This was exactly what I was looking for. It does make sense to simplify the amount of phonemes being used, but also sometimes it may be necessary to simplify by hand. I've run quite a few characters through this process and for the most part they've turned out great. Maybe it is something about the guy's voice that was recorded, but I've found more shapes than normal that weren't lining up with this one specific character.
Keep in mind you will have to reanalyze the audio , or move a phoneme boundary to force the application to "re-co-articulate" the phonemes after changing the setting.