First thing, if you changed your Settings for Animation to DG, then you may likely not hear the audio if you playback. Change to Serial or Parallel. See DG here if you changed it and change it back.

How to import your sound

Last bit, VERY important. right-click on the timeline. On the popup menu go to Cached Playback, then make sure on the sub-popup menu that Cached Playback is NOT checked.

OK, so that's out of the way. Now.... let's look at a plethora of rigs with decent face control.

Character Rigs

AndyRig_v1.4.9.zip

maxformaya_v1.15.mb.zip

Norman_v011.zip

This is a new site with character rigs, I've not tried any yet. Not all will have face rigs, check first before getting attached. Some fall apart and crash. You have been warned.

https://agora.community

Alright, onto the part we actually wanted to do, and looking back at our list it's open/close.

Part 1: Open/Close

I probably overdid the open/close here, but will work for now.

Part 2: Mouth Shape

Now let's work on getting the phonemes close to the audio we have. It's totally cool to write it out. And looking at the book, it's also ok to smudge this together, as in we really shouldn't be articulating every syllable. The book as a couple drawings for closed mouth consonants. Here are some diagrams for a wider range with vowels.

phoneme_mouth_chart_by_cartoonistwill_d1xdmln-fullview.jpg

And another.

A good way to approach this is to (as the book suggests) to pop into vowels from consonants. Thinking of these shape to shape transitions as having no ease-in more like a fast-in, but definitely with a long ease-out. In the below, I didn't really do much pop into with curves. I mostly did it with keys, but I think both approaches should be used or choose which is most effective for the situation.

Part 3: Eyes are Important

Don't be dead in the eyes. They move, a lot, blinking, darting, and so forth. This is when we start to really need reference footage to see what are the natural places when we blink. And, eye movement, saccades, very very important to bringing life into characters.

https://www.bloopanimation.com/blinking-animation/

Also, I overworked this video a bit and should have left a bit for the next two. The issue I had was that my character wasn't in a scene or motivated with purposeful action yet, so I built up a brief narrative for their to be a context for eyes to animate within.

Part 4: Flexibility

Right, so the over all face flexibility. The Andy rig is rather limited, but we're able to push and pull a little bit.

Part 5: Accent & Polish

Here I have a minor accent or two added in. Then realized I should make a major change with body movement and needed to reparent who the hands follow so that I could more easily set the book down. Anyway this is where lots of time would be spent tweaking, correcting, and compensating. I didn't spend much time, but normally would slightly edit curves to pop more, shift keys around by a frame or two, refine, refine, refine. I also do a quick 3-point lighting and playblast here with some higher quality settings.

Now What?

Now we put it all together that's what. Unfortunately Maya will not combine audio and image/video together for you. And in some ways, that's probably for the best, we don't want to use Maya for everything. So combine in After Effects, and push to Media Encoder for compression. Look VERY closely at your import frame rate, composition frame rate, and where you're aligning your audio. If you wish to use Premiere that's also ok. In both After Effects and Premiere check your import media and intermediate frame rates before importing image sequences!

Finally we're done. Not perfect, but we've got the basics.