Has anyone had any positive experiences with the lip sync software for poser animation (like Mimic)? Is there anything similar out yet for P5?

Mimic runs equally few in Poser 5 depending upon the figures you use. It was designed with Posette and Dork in mind, but now that DAZ has provided "eye blink" updates for its various premiere figures, Mimic works quite well for them. Keep in mind DAZ is soon to release Mimic version 2 with added features. What those will be, DAZ hasn't revealed. I suspect it will be tailored for the Mil' figures. However, any figure having at least the morph dial "OpenLips" associated with the head can run Mimic, though the results are a littel something like the mechanistic "jawing" of a puppet. However if a figure has dials like "Mouth T" and other phonemes, the now natural the speech appears. Mimic will create random eye blinks, brow wriggles and head nods for extra "livelyness." Wait just a little bit and Little Dragon will provide a list of exaqmples using such figures as Michael right down to the House Mouse. I bought mine from the original developers, LIPSinc, for 200 hundred dollars and I didn't feel cheated. DAZ, now owning everything about it, sells it for less than 80. Now that's a "steal!" How do you program it? You literally just need to import a good ol' .WAV file with clean audio. You export a .PZ2 (pose) file from the plug-in and apply it to a charcter. When you create an animation, the figure will open and close its lips in sync with the soundtrack. It's literally THAT simple! Sincerely, Bill

Oops! That should be "...runs equally well in Poser 5..." and "...the more natural..." Sincerely, Bill

Thanks for the great review. Do you know if Mimic works in P5 on the P5 man? I'd like to lip sync a character that I've created using the face room textures and morphs.

Attached Link: http://www.mzzkiti.com/M'Ress-5.AVI

He should. "Don" has all the required "phoneme" dials Mimic normally uses. I personally have not tried him so I can not vouch for the results. just to show how adaptable Mimic can be, click on the supplied link. This character is not even remotely human appearing, yet I think she works pretty well. You'll need DivX 5 to run the clip. Sincerely, Bill

Attached Link: http://www.mzzkiti.com/Spock-Sub.AVI

Herea more conventional figure, Dork all morphed up, using Mimic. Again, you'll need DivX 5 to run the clip. Sincerely, Bill

Attached Link: http://www.mzzkiti.com/Alien-1.AVI

And for sheer silliness, I bet Ripley never expected this! Another DivX 5 formatted clip. Sincerely, Bill

Attached Link: http://members.aol.com/felixstore/mimic1.avi

Here's Vicky 3 using Mimic. This also requires the latest DiVx. I tried a quick Mimic test of Don (right after P5 came out), but he didn't work very well. He talked, but it wasn't flawless. -jjsemp

Here are a few more, in good old-fashioned MPEG-1 (DivX NOT required):

DAZ's Michael
The P4 Male
DAZ's Victoria 2 Reduced Resolution
Mike the TV
The Poser wolf
My own Furrette
DAZ's House Mouse
Lemurtek's Lionheart
DAZ's Toonimal Puppy

Mind you, some of these aren't Mimic-compatible "out-of-the-box" ....

I didn't like Judy's speech morphs, so reworked them for my P5JudyMagic, and added new ones. A .pdf user guide installs in the Runtime/ReadMe directory and includes a list of all the 300+ morphs, Mimic use, etc. HTH - Elisa/gryffnn

gryffnn, you do realize that those morphs probably work with Don and the kids, also, right?

Yup, they sure do :-), although I haven't had time to use them on Penny or Will yet. The common head mesh is one of the best things about the Poser 5 figures. The few P5JudyMagic morphs I've used on Don so far needed some mesh tweaking, mostly because I was doing close-up shots. I had planned on putting together a P5DonMagic with all the features, but don't know if there's interest.

You guys have been so helpful in providing me with info about Mimic. Any body have any experience with Textpuppet? The fact that it doesn't work with sound files seems a huge drawback. Does the speech synthesizer sound half-way decent?

Gryffnn, You DEFINITELY should make a P5DonMagic. I think that animators (a minority here - but growing) will use whatever figures become available to them. We're not as "Mike and Vicky"-centric as the still-image folk. And if you make Don Mimic-compatible, that will make him much more useful for animation. I think that Don, "out of the box," is far more interesting than Judy, anyway. We need more guy characters...we've got enough women already. BTW - I didn't realize that your product for Judy made her Mimic-capable. I'm rushing off to buy it right now. (See what I mean?) -jjsemp

textPuppet does a pretty good job. The voices could be better, but for TTS they are pretty good. You do have quite a bit of control over the voices. The biggest drawbacks to me with textPuppet is the fact that you are locked at 30fps and it doesn't put the pz2 file it creates in any of the folders that Poser will recognize. You have to manually copy the pz2 file to a folder. Also it won't let you reopen a previous project.... that's what they call each group that contains a wav file, a pz2 and a text file of the text used. IMHO Mimic is way easier to use and the results are better. I don't like the fact that you are limited to 30fps with textPuppet. I started to use the wav file created by it with Mimic. Ed

Thanks jjsemp! Let me know how you like her. Actually, I do think Don is a more valuable addition to our casts than Judy, as useful as Michael. And I do need to put some serious work into him soon for some projects of my own. But my Victoria3XprssnMagic has been so much more popular than P5JudyMagic, which took far more time and work to create. On the other hand, we have much more freedom to work with the P5 figures than with DAZ's, since they have to protect their own product interests. I did pay attention to maintaining compatibility with other Judy face and pose files, but could be free to rework speech and other morphs, pop in code to work the eyes, etc. So I'll get around to some ideas I have for her, too. Just not enough hours in the day...