The first step to the recording process is understanding and working with audio. So recording and editing is different in character animator. Essentially, you're going to need to take at least three different takes or passes on your animations. So the first pass is going to be audio, the second is probably going to be your face gestures, things like eyes and head tilts, and the third pass will be your triggers. 

With that in mind, since we're going to talk about audio in this video, we're going to bring in a puppet that has a little bit more of an advanced mouth with the vazims, the mouth shapes that you might want to use for your puppet. So we're going to basically swap out magnus here. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and import from the project files rob rigged and ready and it's a little different than the Rob source puppet. 

It's Rob with all of the coolness that you might want to add. So the dangles are in there. Yeah, we can go ahead and zap magnus, turn him off, make sure Rob is armed. Okay, so you've got two options when it comes to that first recording pass, and that is you could either bring in some prebuilt or recorded audio from a dedicated sound design app like adobe Audition where you could clean it up and apply effects and do all that, and I would strongly recommend you do that. 

So the workflow for that would be to go ahead and export that right from audition as a wave file or mp3 and then import it into character animator. So if I go to, hey, there people from the project files you can see, we can add audio files to the project. And if I drag that on top of Rob, the way that we work with pre made audio is to simply select the audio track and go to timeline and go to compute lip sync take from scene audio. 

That's a mouthful, but when you click that it's going to autogenerate the vazims. Now these are going to be inaccurate. Okay. They're about 70% accurate. Okay. So that means you're going to have to do some cleanup and you could wait and do that at the very end if you prefer. But I'd kind of like to take these as one step at a time. So do all the audio edits, do all the face edits, do all the trigger edits, but it's a personal preference thing. 

So if I did want to clean this up, a little bit of sort of a pro tip will be to rather than playing back in real time with the space bar, there are people that's pretty fast and it's kind of hard to see where everything comes in. They've got a nice option here where you see the one times text there. You can actually make it playback slower so that it's going to sound weird, but you're going to actually be able to retime things a lot better. So if I play it back, okay, I can still make out the different sounds, and I can probably retime this better. 

So for starters, I could tell that, hey, neither of these is probably accurate. So notice that these are all the Vazims I've got to work with. Some have shut off screen here a little bit, but there's no H, right? There's A. But you might want to try something that at least changes the mouth shape. So there are times when you're kind of looking for one that might just at least generate something different. 

Okay, so maybe I'll start with the shape I make when I say D and then A. And then there's like a th. All right. The R is correct, so there but I need this to be more of a th. So a nice keyboard shortcut is if you've got your edit line somewhere and you want to split it. On a Mac, it's Command Shift D. On a PC, it's Control shift D. And you can see that that split that up. 

So down at the bottom, I've got L here, and L and th make the same sort of mouse shape that funny shape, right? All right, now the people is actually right here, right? And the O is not correct. So I'm going to actually hit Delete, and you can see that it moves the L to the very end, and that's good, but it still feels like it needs the P poll, right? So let's give this again. Maybe we'll cut it where we can get something akin to a P sound. So up here you can see that M is both B and P. All right. For the mouth shape. So if I play that, it's getting pretty close. So you're going to need to do a little bit sort of sound design or mouth design for all of your audio cakes. 

Now, the other option you have is to just grip it and rip it inside of Character animator. And what I mean is to actually record straight up inside of the app. Before I hit record, I should pay attention to all of the other things I have armed for record. And because I want to break this into parts, I really don't want to have eye gaze or dragger or the face movements. I just want to focus on the audio and the mouth. Okay. So I've disarmed any behaviors I don't want to record, including things like triggers, only the lip sync. 

Okay, so here we go. Rock and Rob here. Okay. And you can see Rock and Rob here. Again, I would want to go in there and change some of the Vizims because it starts with an R sound and it comes much later. So there'd be some cleanup to do. Right. So that would be a raw aww, maybe an A sound that maybe that's fine. Right? 

And this takes, you know, a little bit of a little bit of work in practice. rocking rough here. Not bad. So that is how you can record audio or import audio and generate mouth shapes in character. animator.