I wanted to test the head I modeled. I want to animate the mouth. You know, Phonemes.

How do you do it? What tips are there for this?

I was thinking of adding a bunch of bones to the lips to create the movement. Not sure how to go about it.

While we are at it, do you model the mouth open or closed and why.

One word... morph targets...

er... :blushing: that's two words... but anyway...

Bones are a cumbersome way to make mouth movements (other than the obviously cartoonish "jaw drop" that we see in Tex Avery stuff).  Using C5Pro I create morph targets in the vertex modeller (using the morph tab) for the phenomes and let the software build the sliders.  The manual does an adequate job of explaining the basics so I won't go into details.  The nice thing is that you can combine phenomes with the sliders and make permutations that you hadn't thought of (or reduce the number of phenomes that you need by setting 50% of, say, "oo" to be "oh", etc).

Hope that helps...

Ken

OK thanks, I totaly missed the morph tab. (Slaps forhead. Doh. walks away muttering to himself.)

btw mimc pro has some cool phonemes and expressions. Can save tons of time and be enhanced or altered in carrara. Yeah MT were really usable in c4 I believe, but that is an area that needs more coverage with tuts.

I have mimic pro. I thought the figure needed the morph built before Mimic could use them.

Maybe I am confused about what you want. If you want to have you own figure work with mimic then you need to make it mimic compatible. There are actually tutorials over at DAZ that can help with that info. That can be more involved because you may get odd results. If you are using mimic compatible figures you should only need to select that character and setup you mimic info to animate then export a poser format file you can then import as a pose and apply to a natively loaded character. You can actually see the animation better in D|S w/ out rendering, but the animation tools aren't as good as carrara. Carrara in preview for scrubbing is like molasses in jan running uphill :D Now in regards to what to edit out of the file...that I couldn't really tell you because I have only worked some w/ animation tools in carrara, that slow scrub issue is really a big problem, tries your patience. I think it is the same issue as OGL preview, just made worse by the load.

ren_mem.  I modeled my own head. as in the first line of my first post. "I wanted to test the head I modeled."

I know how to use mimic. I've had it from the day Daz put it out on the market. So that's not a problem. With what you started talking about, I thought I had missed some hiden feature in Mimic. I was trying to find out the best way to create the mouth morphs for the figure head that I modeled.

Thanks for the try in helping though. I don't use DS either. I have P4/5/6 to go along with my Carrara. The only animation that I have done so far in Carrara is my avitar. Maybe I should ask this in the modeling forum.