lipsync and keyframes

I've been working now with the contest shot, slowly but surely. It's going forward but some days I'm having a hard time to find the goals for the day. One day I bumbed into the area of lipsync, and immediately lost my direction. I've overlooked it a bit in the past and now when I tried it, I noticed it's not easy. I have to check on some blend shape tutorials, and try to get a grip on the matter.

I found this tutorial linked in a lot of places.

He is using a MEL-code called "pose to shelf". With this you can make a facial pose, lets say a shape of mouth making an "AA" sound. Then with pressing the pose2shelf button he made buttons from the poses to his shelf. Very convienient. Seems simple and all, but I just couldn't make it work properly. I made poses, but while making other poses, the earlier poses gets messed up.. I still have to work on this, make more tests, tests and tests.

With this tool, I wouldn't have to make all the mouth shapes from the beginning for every syllable. And I guess, this is the way to do it.


And another weird thing with the keyframes. When on graph editor, I select keys and shift drag them left or right. It works properly if the graph is large enough to show a lot of change in the value. But if it's not large enough, the left or right pan resets the graph into a straight line. Which is .. a funny feature. I guess I just have to watch out for it.