Quote - alright so i was looking at the xml file for alyson and what i am trying to do is get Fon and a few other nursoda chars to talk and maybe that map will be good enough for the rest. i have "it talks for frankie" not sure if that will contain the info i need". or is this a case where i would need to make everything from scratch?

You need the phonemes for the Nursoda character you wish to animate. The actual phonemes are morphs. If they are not available then you must make them yourself. They are the mouth shapes a character makes when uttering a particular sound. You do not need a seperate morph for each phoneme if that is too difficult or they are unavailable. You can reference the same morph over and over if necessary. The more varience the better however.

problem is while i have a general understanding of what you mean, applying it is not so easy. 

how can you account for more and one character talking. i am not worried about linking the sound, that will be done later. i am guessing just select a new character and import the audio?

 

The easiest way to do this is to make the speaking animation for each character and save it as a pose file. Then start a new scene and add your characters. Using the scroll  bar at the bottom of your scene move to the frame you wish you character to start speaking and apply the pose you saved to the character.

 

As an example a character says "Hi,; how are you?" A second character responds "Fine; and you?" You would do the speaking part for each character seperately and save it as an animated pose. Then start a new scene and load the two characters. In the first frame apply the "Hi" pose to the first character. Scroll the frame to where the scecon character responds "Fine" and apply your pose to the second character. If you do not have enough frames Poser will ask you if you wish to add more so that the complete "Fine" pose can be added to the timeline. If your characters are talking over each other then just add the second character's speech at the point you need it to speek even if the first pose has yet to complete.

 

Something else to make your life easier is to record on a piece of paper the frame number that you add in a pz2 to start speech.

Character 1 starts speaking at frame 1.

Character 2 starts speaking at frame 17.

Character 1 responds at frame 21.

and so on. This will allow you to sync up your sound with the annimation if you use a seperate compositing program like After Effects, Vegas, Premiere; or whatever.

thanx in advance-

and thank you for before because now at least dazs staples can talk. =o)

 

No problem. Glad I can help.