During the first exercise in this chapter, we animated the character's jaw transform or what is often called a bone in animation speak. While animating this bone worked for our first pass at a simple lip sync animation, it lacked the authenticity of real speech facial expressions we now understand as phonemes. What we really need is a way to control and animate the character's facial muscles to produce the appropriate speech phoneme animations. Fortunately, animators have solved this problem with the use of what is called blend shapes. In order for us to produce a realistic looking lip sync animation, we are going to have a learn a little bit about blend shapes.

Blend shapes or per-vertex morphs are an animation tool that allows for the warping or altering of the vertexes of a mesh at runtime. They are almost always constructed by the modeler building...