Attached Link: http://www.3dtrue.com/poser/36.html

Day five, still waiting:) Good things come to those who wait. I am really excited about sharing my new tool with you folks here on renderosity. I have written a new plug-in for Poser called PoserSpeak. PoserSpeak let's you generate speech right inside Poser. Visit my site for some samples on how easy it is to use. http://www.3dtrue.com/poser/36.html Also, see the short movie featuring PoserSpeak in my gallery... http://www.3dtrue.com/gallery/43.html thanks for reading. james true 3dtrue.com

Fast and efficient. Not as many options as MIMIC, but easier to use, faster, user friendly, AND IT RUNS INSIDE POSER. I recommend it for anyone doing vocal animation. Use this with "naturalizer" and "jiggles", and a bit of manual tweaking for that extra something, and you have your basic vocal animation done in a few minutes.

After having viewed the samples, it looks,....er, sounds fantastic. But I have to wonder...will there be a Mac version?

Given how it works - I doubt there will be a Mac version. It relies on a Windows specific API (the speech api). Still, not a bad tool overall!

Sadly, the limit of this thing is not the Program itself but the absolutly horrible state of speach synth. Everyone sounds like a friggin robot. Still If you don't have access to real voice talent, you CAN dummy up some animation with voice. I haven't checked, but is there a way to save the voice file for sync with the animation? I would prefer a seperate .wav file if possible.

This tool records a wav file from your speech which Poser does use. This means you can also use this wav file in any other program you wish. Also, i have to disagree with the last statement a bit. I do not make voices so i am not even biased, but the three voices you get for free with microsoft are the ones which sound like robots. AT&T, Cepstral, and NeoSpeech however all have some new voices out which are truly remarkable in my opinion. They far exceed what most folks are used to from speech engines. I would recommend you consider trying one or several of these voices, they are very well done.

Attached Link: http://www.nextup.com/

This is how I use this tool. I set up my basic figure animation, and then do the voice, using whatever voice is available. Then I run Naturalizer and Jiggles, two other Python scripts available free here on Renderosity.

Then I render the animation. This gives me the picture quality. I then get my voice actors to overdub the voices, and then I add the sound effects, etc.

So the advantage of this is that the voice actors can see the finished animation, hear what they are supposed to say, and can see from the animation what emphasis and tone to use.

I know this is the "backwards" way, as you are supposed to record the voice first and then animate according to the actors voice, but my "actors" are inexperienced and I couldn't get any feeling of them with just a script reading, and when they can see the animation I am getting more feeling and emotion from them. (I suppose when I get Brad Pitt to act for me I will have to change my methods, but until then this is the perfect tool for pre-visualisation)

If you do want to use the computer generated voices, listen to some of the samples on the link.

Message edited on: 05/17/2005 17:48

sweet idea, i like it!