Howdy everyone, I wanted to take a moment to welcome you to our new MIMIC forum, created to help you with your LIPSinc Mimic needs. I, along with Traveler, will be the Admins here. Trav and I have been using Mimic since it was in Alpha Stage and have created quite a bit of goodies by using it. Now that it is in Beta, it is even easier to use and much funner to play with. He and I will be sharing tips, ideas and downloads for all of you and hope to make your Mimic needs easier and much more enjoyable. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to ask!! Jack

Yeah! What's a Mimic-Specific Character all about? Someone said they converted their character to mimic...what is that? -Darth_Logice (Thanks for making a mimic forum, it's a very exciting development)

Creating the character "Mimic Ready" means that they have import the 15+ morphes needed for the character to speak. Actually each morph works as a set for each Phonic's used while speaking. During the Alpha test, we tried to see if Mimic would work by installing the Phonic Morphs into various meshes, such as a dog, humans, infant, cat, buzz and others and tested them and each worked out great. Not just for English, but also Spanish and Japanese (which I considered the ultimate test). Back then, to install the Morphs into our specific characters, rather than the template, we used Morph mover and imported the morphs to our character heads. Make sure they are still set at "0" Then import the .WAV file you wish to use. Also it helps to get smoother phonics if you type out (also) what is in the .WAV file. Then Render it with the lowest output as an animation (save as .AVI) test it out. After making sure that it is satisfactory, you can add other movements to your character in each frame then render at Full output (this can take some time if you have Antialias on), again saving it as an .AVI then your done!! Full talking animated character that took a short time to do!! Hope that helps! Jack

Does this bring us one step closer to an avatar virtual reality web rather than the text/image internet? We are in the 21st. century now. Slowly making that progession. Probably have to download I-Ex6 in a couple months and upgrade my RAM again. You guys have a great demo on their site. Thanks for the info.

No Problem Speed, I think this greatly decreases the time in which to make animations. It is a HUGE step in the right direction!! Jack

So do we!!! Jack

Just to be pedantic speedofdark, We won't enter the 21st century until January 1st 2001, despite all the crap pronounced by politicians and the media.

Potato.

Looking forward to seeing the 15+ MTs for Mimic. I LOVE Mimic. I spent over 40 hours making a 1 minute talking head using Poser only. Spline interpolations went beserk on me, & 90% of time spent undoing the wacky splines. I am working on making a full on cartoon. Not easy by myself, but I've got all the software I need(well, almost) now to do it. Of course, now I suppose I need to RTFM to know what I'm doing. Will post any progress. Pack

So far I have only done one mimic character. It tried to do Jadzia from DS9 saying "OOOOO...somebody stop me!" But for some reason it added too many frames and messed up the wav. Oh well I'll try it again soon. It's fun though. And about time it came out! Nick

Actually the beta version of MIMIC only needs six morph targets added to a character head to get it to talk. They are: OpenLips Mouth O Mouth M Mouth F Tongue L Tongue T Once you have these morph targets created and added to a custom character, the character works great with MIMIC. I am slowly adding these morph targets to all my characters that should be able to talk. I've had great results with MIMIC so far using it with my custom characters. DaveD RavenStar Video Productions http://members.aol.com/revwhacker/