You’ll have to bare with as this is a quick idea that came to mind and needed to get into writing.
The idea is to create animated mouths for npcs dialogue using decals, Ive found some for each letter of the Alphabet and was wondering the best method.
Personally I thought about creating a table A-Z with the corresponding mouth and as the dialogue goes on it locates the correct letter amd displays that decal. Thoughts on this method or any suggestions on a better form?
Multiple letters cause different movements of the mouth. If you have a tongue then you’ll get into a large variety of movements. Using a table containing the animations from A-Z wouldn’t work that well. You don’t say the word “and” by saying “a” “n” “d”
What I would approach it from is by having someone speak into the audio and having the mouth correspond to the playbackloudness of the audio. This wouldn’t look natural but it’s better than having to make an array for animations for each world.
On the other hand, you could make animations that can combine to make it look like the person is saying something. You could make an animation of “Th”, “an”, silent letters, and etc… and combine them all together to create something that looks like speech.
If you want full realism I suggest you just make pre-made animations for each dialogue.