CDCD opened this issue on May 30, 2002 ยท 9 posts
CDCD posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 5:42 PM
I'm trying to get a litle bit more from Poser, specialy on speech side. Can anyone tell something about the usefullness of the Mimic aplication, and if anyone has experience with the mac version. Thanks CD
Bobasaur posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 5:47 PM
The Mac version just came out about two days ago. I suspect we will be hit very shortly by a blizzard of info, reviews etc. I'm looking forward to hearing what they say. In the meantime you can do a search for the word Mimic and you should find a bunch of stuff, some of it within the last 2 weeks.
Before they made me they broke the mold!
http://home.roadrunner.com/~kflach/
Little_Dragon posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 6:21 PM
From what little I've seen of the Mac version, it looks almost identical to the PC version.
Step 1: Get an audio file of whatever you want your character to say.
Step 2: Feed it into Mimic, along with text of the dialogue.
Step 3: Launch Poser and apply the newly-created .pp2 pose file to your character.
Automated lipsync doesn't get much simpler than this. The pose files will work with most of the human figures, and to a limited degree with others. Several figures (dog, cat, dragon, etc.) have been made Mimic-ready, and can be found in Free Stuff. Others can be adapted with minimal effort.
Video clip #1 (MPEG format, 335KB): Michael character
Video clip #2 (MPEG format, 231KB): Lionheart character (same voice as Michael)
Video clip #3 (MPEG format, 778KB)
Video clip #4 (MPEG format, 633KB)
Video clip #5 (MPEG format, 212KB): Lemurtek's Tobi character
smerc posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 7:14 PM
Little_Dragon I like your clips. I never had good luck with mimic (demo) smerc
3ddave44 posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 7:46 PM
ditto everything smerc said. Nice clips, never had luck; though Im itching to try again.
wolf359 posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 8:28 PM
Attached Link: http://66.70.166.29/promo/flux2.mpg
I was a beta tester for the MAC version ( see link)i am now doing in 3 minutes what used to take 4 hours
of key framing phonemes in the Graph editor.
and i can apply mimic animations on top of
my existing BVH Motion by simply and quickly deleting all the animation data for the head and neck first
and have instant walking and talking characters
its a tremendous time saver!!
originalplaid posted Thu, 30 May 2002 at 11:46 PM
It's great... I have been playing around with it some. My friend has it and as soon as I get money I plan to buy it... The only thing that I must stress is that the sound clip works best if there isn't any other noises in the background. This also includes sounds of heavy breathing and microphone thumps, which makes your character mimic them! Also it helps if the sound clip isn't of someone talking a million miles a minute. But so far all the clips I have tried have worked quite well.
scaramouche posted Fri, 31 May 2002 at 6:46 AM
The students in my CG classes have been beta-testing Mimic for Mac over the past month and working with Poser 4 for the past four months. If there were a way of hosting their clips, I'd post a link to them. One of my more inventive students recorded a short clip of Eminem "singing" (I guess that's what he does?!) in Sound Recorder then imported the clip into Mimic, and then assigned the cat character to do the vocals with the soundtrack. It is an absolute scream! When this semester ends (around mid-June), I'm going to compile a CD of all the students' assignments and send a copy to both Steven Wright at Mimic and Steve Cooper at Curious Labs. If anyone else wants a copy, please email me at laptop@email.com Please bear in mind that these works were done by junior-high and senior-high students - not professional animators!
CDCD posted Fri, 31 May 2002 at 5:07 PM
Thanks to everybody who answered to my Mimic question.