Using showing/hiding of images as alternative

[Bazmundi]

Description

Hi. To mix up styles, I am looking at ways of adding lip synching of animated 3D characters with images wrapped to the mouth and the lip sync showing/hiding the images.

Any chance in a future upgrade that option is available please?

Otherwise, brilliant addon, way useful!

[Premik]

Hi @Bazmundi,
I assume you are currently able to animate showing/hiding the wrapped image somehow using Blender.
Do you have an image sequence on a mesh/empty? Or images as separate Objects? Or do you animate the actual object visibility?

In this older ticket somebody did a similar thing for 2D animation.
I think there it was done by animating image positions.

Oonly Action or Shape-key Action can be used in the mapping. So if you want to animate for example the Surface/Frame offset of an Image sequence those can't be directly used as it is animating material property. Such keyframes show in Dopesheet but not in Actions.
For that you can for instance create a Driver and base the Frame offset on a bone's Z location and then animate that bone. Here is a nice video about this approach.

But probably easier is to add a custom int property say my_frame on the Object level (not material level). Then copy as new driver from the context menu and paste the driver onto the Surface/Frame offset. This new my_frame can then be animated using normal object Action and selected in the mapping drop-down selector (disable shape-key filter to see it in the dropdown).
If you put each "image" on each frame in the Action you can then map the same Action to all shape-keys and use custom sub-frame range:

Also remember to set the In Out Blend Type to No Blending in the Strip placement settings section. And use a single NLA track in the Mapping section.

I should probably create some video describing this in more detail...

[Bazmundi]

LOL, I had a go at an add-on!

So my first very first blender add-on is on display is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3MXjtBPEGY

I hope you don't mind, I borrowed the json file to suck in a folder of images named A..H,x.

Draft add-on in work (really only hacked together yesterday) at:
https://github.com/OrganicMonkeyMotion/mouth_shape_animator

Note https://github.com/OrganicMonkeyMotion/mouth_shape_animator/issues

I have solve the transparency problem (although I am working in Blender 4.3 so haven't back tracked versions).

So the info you provided above gave me the hint and I then followed up with manually setting the generated actions, which are now in the drop downs obviously 😄.

Some quirks still being worked through.

[Premik]

Cool. Good stuff. That's the beauty of open source. Feel free to open a PR if you find anything worth porting ;-)

[Bazmundi]

Happy enough if you grab the code from my repository. It would remove the manual assignement of actions etc.