I got the demo, but I can't tell if it's worth buying. How does it handle emotions? Can it tell the difference between angry and happy? Is there a way to make the facial expressions exagerated or subtle? If I have a character with her face in her hands looking down, can I still use head movements or will it pop her head right back to staring straight ahead? What if her head is turned, does it turn it back to forward? Basically, is Mimic worth the price?

Mimic doesn't do emotions particularly well, it just handles lipsync, blinking and brow-waggling, tongue and head movement (about ten morphs, altogether). You can adjust the other face morphs in Poser to create expressions like anger or happiness, and the animation file generated by Mimic won't overwrite them. So basically, any emotions you want will have to be added manually.

If you have head movements enabled in Mimic, the head will bob about during speech, and yes, it faces forward. But you can use the neck dials instead to aim the head in whatever direction you wish. Or you can disable head movements in Mimic and pose the head by hand.

I recently gave my Sabrina character some morphs and made her Mimic-capable. It was only a test, so I didn't put a lot of work in the lip-shaping morphs, but it still looks convincing:
Video clip #1 (MPEG format, 633KB)
Video clip #2 (MPEG format, 781KB)

If you'll be including a lot of speech in your animations, then yes, Mimic is probably worth the price. It'll save you much gruntwork.

But you might also look at the alternative, textPuppet, which also generates lipsync animation files for use in Poser. It works with text files instead of voice files, and generates synthesized speech, but you can still use it to generate lip movements, then replace the synthesized speech file with actual voice files afterward. And it does have settings for emotional expressions. A demo is available.

Does textPuppet offer a demo of the program, or just video clips? And does anybody know if Mimic will be coming out with an update to give it more flexibility?

BTW, just watched your clips. Very cool. Any chance you can mimic a wav of an angry shouted sentence and send me the file, or is that against the rules? I just want to be certain before I buy the program, because if I do, that means I won't be eating for several weeks.

textPuppet has a demo, the same as Mimic. You can find it at the link I provided. LIPSinc will supposedly be releasing a version of Mimic for the Macintosh soon; I haven't heard anything about version 2.0. LIPSinc doesn't have commercial restrictions on Mimic's output, so yes, if the .wav file isn't too long, email it to me (with text of the dialogue) and I'll get a .pz2 sample file back to you in the next hour or so for evaluation. I'll send you my email address by Instant Messaging.

Hi I have both programs and I like Mimic is a much better than textPuppet. textPuppet is set a 30fps and can't be changed. The text to speech engine they use is quite good, but it's still not real speech. You have to manually copy the pz2 to a folder in the Poses folder. Once you have created a project you can't reopen the project again unless you delete the wav and pz2 file that it creates. The movements are easy to tweak, but the other things I mentioned above are a real pain IMHO. Ed

Attached Link: http://impudicus.virtualave.net/zexy.html

AliasAngel, I have found Mimic to be a spectacular lipsync program. Even better than some of the high-end programs i've had occasion to use. This could be due to the quality of Daz's pre-built morph targets, but whatever the reason... I think it rocks! Here's a clip I did, using Mimic, of Vickie singing. I forgot to make her blink, but I think it came out rather nicely. You'll need Quicktime to see it.

Is there anyway to use either with Vickie or Mike?

Mimic and textPuppet will work with any Poser figure that has compatible morphs/body parts. This includes Posette, the P4 Male, Michael, Victoria, Stephanie, the Millennium Kids, and the Millennium Baby.

If a figure doesn't have compatible morphs, they can be added, as I did with Sabrina. JFStan recently posted Mimic morphs in Free Stuff for the Poser dog and raptor. Other figures that have been made Mimic-able in the past include the cat, DAZ dragon, panther, and dolphin. ming has some freebie figures over at It's Ming!.

Impudicus Rex - I'm not able to view that no matter what I download. Do you have it in any other format?

You can't view it with Quicktime 5? If you're really THAT keen on seein' it... Jus' tell me what format ya want, and I'll convert it. Easy-peasy an' happy to do it.

Well, I don't know why it wouldn't work for me. Has anybody else had that problem? And I can normally view almost anything, so I don't know what format to suggest.