In particular, I'm using Nursoda's Hein character. I'd like to create a Viseme but editing existing files doesn't seem to work correctly using Hein. Any help is appreciated.

OK, so this is what I have come up with: Viseme doesn't work for me. I was able to use the Creech file and that did the trick as far as mapping goes. Just the results aren't good enough to warrant the trouble, so what I'm doing instead is creating a new expression preset for each phoneme, and them using those to animate the dialog. It isn't super fast, but it is very accurate, and reads a hell of a lot more professionally. I'm just doing it for fun, but I do want it to look good. Using phoneme expressions also allows me to get the beard animated easily at the same time. It is just much nicer.

Good to hear you found a solution!!

Any character can have a viseme file and work in Poser. They are XML files and hand editable. I had one or more lengthy tutorials with examples on this forum but can no longer find them via the current search function.

Ok I found it. It's on another site in my Tutorials section and you will have to register to gain access to the boards. I'll solve that issues for you with a little copy and paste. Here I disect the Alyson Viseme xml in order to explain how to write your own. It was originally an explaination of how I wrote the visemes for G,G2M, and G2F even though I am not a fan of DSON and don't use the figures myself.

And just in case everyone thought I'd forgotten. Diminished capacity and all ; I did. Here we go:

This is the Alyson viseme map. I've chopped a lot of the lines from it for brevity sake. We'll take each section and explain what it is and does. By the time we are done you will know how to make any figure talk in Poser. Doesn't matter what it is or which company or person made it. If the figure works in Poser then we can make it talk. Over the years I've done the "Heavies" series of animals, Mil Dragon 1 and 2, A car for a cartoon take off of an old American tv show, My Mother the Car; and a donkey to do a Francis The Talking Mule take off; and the Poser horse of course.

Each XML file has 5 parts as I have mentioned above. They are pretty self explainatory but let's look at each section one at a time.

This is the first section. It tells you, the user; the name of the character the file is for. If we were making this file for UGH by D3D then we would replace figureName="Alyson" with figureName="Ugh".

If we were doing this file so that Ugh spoke German, we would change language="English" to language="German". This is for the user's benefit. Poser doesn't care what the language is.

subLanguage="US" This is the dictionary Poser uses to match phonetics when using typing the text that matches your audio file. The phonetic dictionaries in Poser are editable and you can have as many as you like. They just need to be the one pointed to by the xml file. That allows you to have your characters lips sync with special sounds that are not usually found in English.

This is the second section. It assures that the figure you are animating in Talk Designer actually moves. Because different figures may have different internal names for the head and each eye; this line exists to ensure compatibility with the figure you use. You can check the internal name (the name Poser really uses) of the head and each eye by clicking on them and accessing the properties tab. These internal names are usually the names assigned to the obj file when they were created or grouped.

~~~ lots of lines deleted ~~~

These lines are the majority of the file and the ones that drive the facial expressions. If we have a set of phoneme morphs for our figure this is an easy section to work with. Each phoneme will have a corresponding morph and we just make sure that the internal name of the morph corresponds with the correct phoneme. In the lines shown above the only thing that would change with different figures is morph="?" where the ? is replaced by the internal name of the morph you want to activate a given phoneme. The phonemes never change. They are a fixed part of speech. Only the morphs that a phoneme drives will ever change.

If you do not have a set of phoneme morphs one need not fear. These morphs are the mouth and tongue shapes made when you talk. You can make your own morphs and link them to the phoneme of choice. If you do not have the phoneme morphs or the skill to make your own do not fear. Just hook the phonemes up to open/close mouth morphs and maybe a few smile morphs as well. If you do not have a morph to drive a phoneme just delete the entire line from the file. There is a minimum of one phoneme definition per file but I would recommend you leave in a couple to drive what ever morphs you may have. The more phonemes, the more life like the speech.

This fourth section is a fine tuning section. Talk Designer will add in eye blinks and random head motions to make your speech more life like. If you find that the character you are using is moving too far to the extreams, or maybe you want them to move a bit more; then this is where the fine tuning of the head and eyes takes place.

The final section. The emotions. These are face files that you link Talk Designer to to fine tune your figures spoken words.fcz is just a compressed fc2. A face file. You can make your own facial pose and save it to the Face Room. You can buy a set of facial emotions. Some may have come with your figure. Just link these emotions to face files of the proper name such as Joy.fcz or Joy.fc2. Spelling matters.

Save the file with a name you can find, and you are done. You have made a Talk Designer xml file that will allow the figure of your choice to be 100% compatabile with Poser's Talk Designer. No matter who made the figure. If you cam move it in Poser then it can talk in Poser. Even Genesis.

A more complete tutorial with video can be found via Google search using my handle and viseme.