EricofSD opened this issue on Sep 14, 2002 ยท 22 posts
jjsemp posted Sun, 15 September 2002 at 3:30 AM
Hi King Kupa. I tried a quick test with Judy as well. I used a pose file that I'd already used before on a P4 figure (with excellent results). Sorry to say that Judy's eyes and eyebrows don't move either. She also has a bit of a lisp -- meaning that her tongue seems to want to stay a little too prominently visible while she speaks. All of these things are "tweakable" but I sure do miss the "working-right-out-of-the-box" experience of using the old P4 figures with Mimic. I fervently wish that more time would be spent on Mimic compatibility when Curious Labs and Daz build their newer, more complicated figures. You don't realize what a gold mine you'd uncover if you catered more to the world of animation. I'm making an animated film with Poser which is very dialogue-heavy and relies on Mimic a lot. In fact, it's the combination of Mimic and Poser that made me decide to purchase Poser in the first place. But I've been forced to exclusively rely upon ONLY the P4 figures. Simply put, they've been set up correctly for Mimic and that makes them worth their virtual weight in gold. I'm an animation industry veteran producer (20 years and counting) and the lure of instant lip-sync was too good to pass up. I started my career in pre-production doing "track-reading", the tedious first step in making a cartoon in which all the dialogue is "broken down" into frames on "beat sheets" for the animators to work from. The fact that these new hi-tech tools eliminate that boring, time-consuming process is miraculous. But the professional animation world knows nothing about any of this. It's Poser's best-kept secret -- and that's not a good thing for your bottom line. The focus of the Poser community is directed too much on still shots of skin pores and eyelashes, and naked women in temples with swords. While these things have great value, I think that if the professional animation world caught on to how versatile Poser and Mimic can be, your sales would go through the roof. Something to think about... When I have more time tomorrow, I'll run tests on all verions of Don and Judy and get back to you. Thanks for listening to me rant. Timoteo: your animation looks great. It's hard to evaluate Mimic's performance with the dialogue removed, but the mouth movement seemed very natural. Great work! I'm curious as to why you think Mike does a better job. My experiments with him yielded really, really lousy results. I look forward to further posts from you on the issue. Please enlighten me! Little Dragon: Y'know, I realize that I can tinker with the morphs and such, but, like Artist3D, I also bought Mimic at full price just so that I wouldn't have to DO any of that stuff. I HATE having to suddenly think like a programmer and tinker under the hood. I'm lazy. I bought Mimic to make my life easier and obtain INSTANT lip-sync. If it's so easy, why don't Daz and Curious do it for me? Wouldn't it make their figures worth the money we pay for them? EricofSD: a figure that's fully Mimic-compatible should be able to blink and raise it's eyebrows as part of the process. The lowly P4 figures do it beautifully. All the other figures built since then just haven't been set up right for it. The figure-creators' priorities have been elsewhere. --jjsemp