Lip synch software for pre-recorded speech?
vrba79
Posts: 1,432
I'm trying to find a way to automate animating speech for my Youtube show. I record the dialog, run it through post, then render out the visemes manually. This gets VERY tedious. To quote infomercials "There's got to be a better way." I see two main products that deal with speech animation, Anilip, and Mimic Live. But neither of them seem actually geared towards what I am trying to do. One seems geared towards live mic sessions. The other guard towards making use of TTS. I'm told the latter can be made to accomodate real speech...if said speech is edited to fit the animation. That's not what I'm wanting to do though. Is there anything on the site that would meet my needs?
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Those are the two options as far as I know.
From what I read here the other day, you can use Mimic Live to make Aniblocks of the speech animation, just like you would with AniLip. I haven't tried it with Mimic, however.
Tweaking an existing speech animation should be easier than hand-crafting visemes, since you're simply adding (or removing) frames to extend or shorten a given viseme. For example, if you find the animation for "The Rain In Spain Stays Mainly In The Plains" hits the "P" too soon, you can copy the "e" frames and paste them between the end of the "e" and the "P". Of course that's if you have KeyMate.
As well, you can extend the AniLip animation by reducing the speed, which makes it easier to match the spoken word with the animation. It also offers manual adjustment of the visemes, so you should be able to tweak them to fit the recorded dialog.
Lastly, one of the biggest issues I always see with 3D animations is what gets shown and focused on when it doesn't need to be, namely, things that you don't focus on in live-action films. Animators get hung up on the idea of showing off the animation of details like lips, eyes, cloth, water, skin, hair, etc, that they struggle with it. This is why you see 3D characters with exaggerrated mouth movements when speaking, when most words are shaped inside the mouth more than with the lips. They focus on making the lips come together between every word, and expand drastically when they do part. While this is nice for cartoony Pixar/Dreamworks stuff like Brave or Monster's Inc, if you're not doing that, don't do that. You don't have to do Howdy-Doody style up-and-down mouth movements, but you don't have to make lip reading possible, either.
Nope ..... one of the many reasons I still use the Daz genesis2 figures is
that they are compatible with the
venerable but discontinued Daz mimic 3 pro
(Please limit width to 800 px. ~Mod)
Mimic3 Pro imports your already edited wav file audio
and has a timeline with phoneme strength editor even an expression editor.
I am using it for my current feature length film projects.
for you G3/G8 users mimic live or Anilip
is really your only option within daz studio
Of course there are several options for G3/G8
lipsynch & face animation if you export them to other programs like Autodesk Maya
and set up Maya controlers for the G3/G8 face rig etc etc .
Checking current prices, you can get Maya for $185 a month, $1470 a year, or $4410 for a 3-year subscription.
Renting software ain't my bag, baby.
install the 32bit D|S as well and use the inbuilt lipsync
you can save it as a pose to use on the 64bit
most
Genesis 8 uses the Genesis 3 dmc file in my library~general
Thanks for the hot tip. If it supports those, then G2 surely.
I completely forgot about
using the free lipsinc in the 32 bit DS version
for prerecorded audio
indeed this is the OP's best option.
Although A mate of mine over at Cgsociety
reported problems with a really long audio files in the 32 bit DS
(over ten minutes ) but apparently his client was not willing
to accept anything but continuous speech for the length of the dialog
so this may not ever be an issue for the OP.
What should the 32 bit be saved as - pose preset? How does synched audio file get saved? Where can I find the G8configuration file please?
Yes, a pose preset. The audio file isn't saved, and isn't included in the output if you render to video (but it's better to render to an image sequence anyway, then stitch that and the auddio into a video in a dedicated editor).
Thanks, Richard. Do you perchance know where I can find the G8 configuration file (.dmc), please?
I'm not sure, sorry.
Any chance you could point me to where I can get the Genesis 3 dmc. file please?