Lip Sync

Overview

Adding lip sync to your 3D avatars can bring them to life, making them more interactive. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to enable lip sync on Ready Player Me avatars using React Three Fiber and Three.js. You’ll learn how to sync facial animations with an audio file, making your 3D characters talk realistically.

Making 3D Avatars Speak with Lip Sync

Imagine you’re building an interactive 3D character for a game, a virtual assistant, or an educational tool. A static avatar with simple animations might not be enough to create an immersive experience. By integrating lip sync, you can make your character’s mouth movements match speech, making them more lifelike and engaging. This tutorial will show you how to do that step by step.

Insights and Skills

Throughout this tutorial, you’ll learn:

How to set up a Ready Player Me avatar in React Three Fiber
Understanding MorphTargets and Visemes for facial animations
Using Mixamo animations for character movements
Generating text-to-speech (TTS) audio with Eleven Labs
Extracting visemes from an audio file using Rhubarb Lip Sync
Mapping extracted visemes to the avatar’s facial animations
Implementing logic to sync audio with mouth movements
(Optional) Adding head tracking for more realism

By the end, you’ll have a fully functional game that you can modify, expand, or use as a foundation for your own game ideas.

Tech Stack

React Three Fiber
Three.js
[Ready Player Me](https://readyplayer.me/)
Mixamo
Eleven Labs
[Rhubarb Lip Sync](https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync)

Experience the project in action and explore the final implementation

Live demo 🏖️
Starter pack 🔗
Final code 🔗

Resources

[Ready Player Me documentation](https://docs.readyplayer.me/ready-player-me/api-reference/rest-api/avatars/get-3d-avatars**#examples**-7)
Convert MP3 to OGG
Eleven Labs (TTS)
Mixamo Animations
LeonardoAI

#threejs #r3f #blender

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