Automatic lip sync animation generator for Blender animations

Simon Stone — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:20:49 +0000

I don't know if anyone else here has ever used Blender or tried their hand at 3D animation, but if you have, you know it's hard. Like really hard.

I've been using Blender for well over 5 years, and I've definitely improved at animation, but there's one thing I've never gotten right: facial animation.

Making and animating detailed facial rigs or shape keys to line up your character's mouth to a voice recording is a challenge, so I set out to make a tool that can handle that for you. While there are addons such as Rhubarb's Blender addon that are great, and other programs like Adobe Character Animator that have similar capabilities, I haven't found anything simple enough where you don't need to worry about rigging or deforming the mesh (or paying Adobe licenses).

My solution was to make an app which utilizes Rhubarb to analyze audio, but lets you use pre-made mouth "poses" (or upload your own) and download an image sequence. Then you can use this in your 3D program of choice and just add it to your character as an image texture, and it's worked really well for what I wanted it for (Lego Brickfilm animations in Blender).

I made it with a Supabase backend and OAuth, Typescript/CSS, a Rhubarb WASM package, and hosted on Vercel.

If anyone's interested, here's the free tool I made for myself where you can upload an audio file (up to 1m) and your drawn mouth shapes (or use the default) and just download as an image sequence. I've used it for lego animations but I think it would work well for any 3d animations with a cartoony style or even 2D animation (although I'm not very good at that). I hope someone finds this useful or at least interesting!

Here is a quick 1-minute demo showing how it works in Blender: Watch the demo on YouTube

You can try it out for free here

DEV Community: Simon Stone

Automatic lip sync animation generator for Blender animations