For lip-synching, nothing beats a good set of poses and an Action you ve created to assemble them. The program very nicely includes a dope sheet, from which you can preview your sound and align words to match the audio. If you want, you can even have the program apply the proper phonemes automatically for instant speech. Note that I ve had better success by adjusting pose sliders manually, but the beginner might appreciate the kick-stand. Anyway, once the speech is assembled, it s simply a matter of dropping the action onto your character in the final choreography, and they re talking away.
Great power lies in constraints.
By applying rules to the behavior of a skeleton, you can keep joints from bending the wrong way, force a bone to point at something else in the scene, or keep feet anchored to the ground. Further, you can constrain objects to follow a pre-made path, or even a spline that is part of an object. Master without mentioning the dynamics. You can bring wind and gravity into play, and after you ve done your tweaking, the end result can be amazing. And it s so damned speedy, too - certainly quicker than simulators seen for other, more expensive packages.