LipSync Studio — Audio-Driven Mouth Animation for Blender

Three analysis engines, six viseme rig presets (ARKit 52 / FACEIT / Preston Blair / MetaHuman / CC4 / Generic), multi-mesh characters, jaw-bone rigs, a baked mouth-openness driver, auto blink and idle, loudness intensity, range punch-in, push-to-NLA, emotion overlay and one-click Rhubarb download.

New in v1.4.0: six new tools that take the result from "the mouth moves" to "the shot is animated". Bake a mouth-openness value you can drive any shader or object with, add natural eye blinks and a subtle idle, drive a jaw bone for rigs with no mouth shape keys, copy one analysis onto every selected character at once, scale the mouth by how loud the speech is, and re-bake just one phrase inside a frame range without touching the rest.

From v1.3.0: multi-mesh characters animate as one — when a Faceit or ARKit face is split across several meshes that share the same blendshapes (head, beard, eyebrows, tongue, teeth), LipSync Studio drives the mouth on every one of them in sync. Building on v1.2.0: full ARKit / Faceit / MetaHuman support with split left and right shape keys, the FACEIT preset mapped to the ARKit blendshapes modern Faceit bakes, and a fully reversible Push-to-NLA workflow.

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Why LipSync Studio

Mouth animation is one of the most expensive things in character work — and the existing Blender addons either ship a 30 MB download no marketplace allows, or leave you to install extra tools by hand. LipSync Studio takes the middle path: a tiny addon that downloads only the binary you need on first run, picks a viseme preset that matches your existing rig, and bakes the result into an NLA strip you can blend with the rest of the performance.

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Features

Three analysis engines

• Built-in — energy analysis. Fast, language-agnostic, less precise.
• Rhubarb Lip Sync — phoneme-accurate, text-aided. One-click download.
• OpenAI Whisper — speech to text plus phonemes (English only currently).

One-click Rhubarb download

Auto-detects your platform (Windows, macOS Intel, macOS Apple Silicon, Linux), fetches the official release, and sets it up automatically. About 8 MB instead of bundling 30 MB in the download.

Six viseme rig presets

One-click mapping that fills all 17 viseme slots with the shape-key names your rig already uses:

• Generic — Blender default viseme naming
• ARKit 52 — Apple ARKit / Live Link Face / iPhone capture
• FACEIT — the FACEIT Blender addon
• Preston Blair — classic 9-shape animator set
• MetaHuman — Epic MetaHuman / Live Link Face control rig
• CC4 — Reallusion Character Creator 4 / iClone 8

Auto-Detect scans your shape-key names and matches them automatically when no preset fits.

Multi-mesh characters

Faceit and ARKit characters often split one face across several meshes that all carry the same blendshapes — a separate head, beard, eyebrows, tongue or teeth. LipSync Studio applies the same viseme animation to every character mesh that has matching shape keys, so the whole face speaks together. Each mesh resolves its own shape-key names (left and right halves included) and its control-rig drivers are handled per mesh, so the mouth opens reliably even when facial hair covers it. A single checkbox in Settings turns this on or off; when off, only the selected mesh animates. Clear removes the animation from every mesh it touched and restores the drivers it muted.

Baked mouth-openness driver (new)

Bake a keyframed 0 to 1 mouth-openness value onto the character as a custom property, tracking how far the mouth is open on every frame (open vowels read high, closed and pressed-lip shapes read near zero). Add a driver from it to a shader input, a jaw bone, a jiggle, a corrective, or a second character — one honest speech signal you can wire anywhere. Runs on its own or automatically on Build.

Auto blink and micro-idle (new)

Adds natural eye blinks on the eyeBlink shape keys (ARKit left and right, or a single blink shape) at slightly randomised intervals, each a quick close and open. An optional micro-idle adds a gentle head sway so the character never sits perfectly still — kept conservative so it never fights the lip-sync. The timing is reproducible, so a rebuild gives the same performance.

Jaw-bone rigs (new)

For rigs whose mouth is a bone rather than shape keys: choose the Jaw Bone rig type, pick the armature and the jaw bone, and LipSync Studio rotates the jaw open and closed in time with the speech — wide for open vowels, closed on pressed-lip and rest shapes — with a pickable open axis and maximum angle.

Copy to other characters (new)

Analyse one audio track, select any number of other character meshes, and build the same lip-sync on all of them in one click. Each character resolves its own shape-key names through its preset, so a crowd or a dialogue partner can share a single analysis.

Loudness intensity (new)

Scale every viseme keyframe by how loud the speech is at that moment: shouting opens the mouth wide, a whisper keeps it small. A strength slider blends between a flat performance and a fully loudness-driven one.

Range re-bake / punch-in (new)

Iterate on a single phrase. Turn on Limit to Range, set a start and end frame, and re-bake only that window — every keyframe outside it is left exactly as it was. Tweak the intensity or blend on one line without disturbing the rest of the take.

Push to NLA

After build, push the lip-sync action down into a dedicated NLA strip on each animated mesh's shape-key track so it blends with other actions (idle breathing, expression layers). Fully reversible.

Emotion overlay

Additive Happy / Sad / Angry / Surprised expression keyframed on top of the speech, with an adjustable strength slider. Uses named emotion shape keys — rename to fit your rig.

Modal threaded analysis

Whisper and Rhubarb run in worker threads driven by a modal timer — Blender's UI stays responsive during long audio analysis.

Auto blend

Configurable ease-in and ease-out per viseme keyframe, adjustable intensity multiplier.

Clean, editable result

Re-runs overwrite the existing lip-sync action instead of leaking numbered duplicate copies that bloat the scene file.

Plain-English audio errors

Corrupted audio, missing file, or unsupported codec now report a clear cause instead of a Python error.

Export — FBX / glTF / JSON

Ship the result to Unity (FBX with shape-key animation), Unreal (FBX), or any custom pipeline (JSON viseme timeline).

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Compatibility

• Blender: 3.2 and later (tested on 3.6 LTS and 4.2 LTS)
• OS: Windows / macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) / Linux
• Rhubarb: any recent build (download from the preferences panel)
• Whisper: the OpenAI Whisper package in Blender's Python (English only)

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What you get

• LipSync Studio add-on (Python only, no binary in the download)
• Six viseme presets out of the box
• One-click Rhubarb downloader
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

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Install

Preferences, Add-ons, Install, pick the downloaded ZIP, enable. The LipSync sidebar tab appears in the 3D Viewport (press N).

For Rhubarb analysis: open the addon preferences and click Download Rhubarb. The right binary for your platform is fetched (about 8 MB).

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License

GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons. Rhubarb itself is MIT — you can ship the resulting animation in any commercial project.

1.4.3 — Diagnose Rig no longer takes Blender down with it when there is no window — in a headless render farm or a batch script the popup it uses crashed the process outright, losing unsaved work. It now prints the report to the console in that case and shows the popup only when there is a window to show it in. Verified end to end on a character with 20 viseme shape keys: mapping, build, blinks, openness bake, timeline export, clear and rebuild — 12 checks, no problems.