I am an acknowledged newbie trying to learn Poser so I can teach it in next fall's computer graphics and animation course that I offer as a high school elective (among other software packages like Terragen, Vue d'Esprit, Bryce, and DoGA). I have basically memorized the Poser phoneme libraries for character mouth formations and have done some rudimentary animations. I have played around with the download demos of textPuppet and LipSinc's MIMIC. The drawback for textPuppet is that, IMHO, it is a pale imitation of the Macintosh text-to-speech engine that's been around for about ten years and the voicings sound like very poor telephone connections sifted through molasses. The drawbacks to the MIMIC demo are that a) the demo is only good for two days and b) relies on existing recorded WAV files together with the .fc2 files it generates. I have taken advantage of a site posted here in the forum at http://www.fantasy3d.com/phon/posersync.html for creating animation script .fc2 files. This site is, without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely outstanding! However, I still have to create my own .WAV files and time them just right to coincide with the characters speaking. I am not comfortable with MIMIC's copy-protection scheme - I can't imagine how in the world I'm going to equip a lab with headphones, microphones, and all the CD's at $195US per MIMIC CD - and it is only version 1.0! TextPuppet is currently version 1.1, and sells for $139US. Which leaves me wondering how in the world the included Poser CD sample voiced animations were done? Evidently not by using textPuppet or MIMIC? If anyone reading this posting has any knowledge of other programs I could sample that combine text-to-speech and creates .fc2 files at the same time I want to hear from you. Please bear in mind that I am a poor rural school teacher, so I do not have unlimited funds available (the purchasing agent nearly had kittens when I ordered both education versions of Poser 4 and Bryce 5)! TIA

Mr. Cutting?