Why is there no good lip sync solution for Genesis 8?
Auroratrek
Posts: 218
Daz has made a lot of improvements to its animation capabilities in the last year or so, but you really can't do quality character animation without decent lip sync. There hasn't been a decent solution since Mimic Pro, over a decade ago. Will we ever get good lip sync for Genesis 8? I'd like to move on from V4/M4!
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There are a couple of recent products:
https://www.daz3d.com/anilip-2
https://www.daz3d.com/face-mojo--facial-mocap-retargeting-genesis-3-and-8-bundle
Anilip 2??? Make your own judgement
about its price verses performance.
The Face mojo software is an excellent option for Iphone owners or those who are willing to buy an Iphone
(used Iphone 11 perhaps??)
That is the state of things for G8
Face Mojo is pretty impressive in its ability to animate expressions, but I can't say that the lip sync looks terribly precise in the samples on their site--they look a bit stiff, and there are limited tongue movements. It also wouldn't be terribly useful for pre-recorded and edited voice tracks, which is what most animators (and myself) work with. Anilip looks to have more range of movement in the mouth/lips, but is really not very accurate in their samples. To be fair, Mimic Pro didn't always do a great job with its initial "automatic" lip snyc, but it was really easy to edit the phonemes track after the initial import--the phonemes work a little like Aniblocks--and you can get pretty good results. It doesn't look like you can edit the phoneme track within the Anilip application in the same way, tho I can't be 100% sure from the info on their vendor page. It might help if we could see the video tutorials they mention on their site so we could see what the editing capabilities are like.
With several new Iphone/ARK kit, camera based facial mocap options
seemingly appearing every year, the age of the audio based lipsynch systems may be sadly, coming to a close
That said I dont/wont buy any apple luxury brand products
The primary reason I moved away from the DAZ genesis ecosystem ,for primary CG actors, is because Reallusion still offers a powerful built-in audio based system with lip smoothing and phoneme replacement pallet along side of its optional Iphone based facial capture plugin.
Creating the lip sync for"Galactus Rising" was a cumbersome chore
of having to use the Zombie mimic pro 3 for my G2 and below figures and piping hard line audio in from a second computer to trick Daz mimic live into capturing my pre-recorded audio for G3 & above
and then manually animating facial expressions on top of the lipsync .
I remember reading about your "oversized eyes" issue requiring you to stick with a custom V4 Character in your current film project
So I know it is frustating wanting to move on to modern assets.
Frankly I actually had a different,more resolute ending planned for "Galactus Rising" But effectively "quit" the project at 92 minutes and rolled credits.
This is because I was so tired & desperate to move on to my new streamlined ,Realtime Iclone/CC3/Blender based pipeline all with native program features and Zero third party dependencies for primary animation/lipsync and rendering.
Even if you find the results from Anilip2 or FaceMojo acceptable
they remain third party ,single point of failure, options that eventually may be broken by a DS update or a new genesis figure generation with no assurance that the third party vendors will be around/alive in the future to provide updates.
@Auroratrek
What did you use for your Star Trek videos?
Yeesh.
There is a free software called Papagayo that I was able to use to do lip syncing. I wrote a script that converts its output into a file that I can import into DAZ Studio. Here is an animation I made using it on Genesis 8.
Very! It seems like everything I try runs into a road block (or "buts").
MimicPro actyually works pretty well for editing phonemes right onto a sample Daz character, but doesn't work with G8.
Papgayo works with G8, but you don't get to see a representation of the Daz model when you're editing the phonemes, or have a lot of control.
Anilip works with G8, but it doesn't appear to have robust phoneme editing either.
I'd be happy to try using the Face Control to animate the mouth movements manually, but as far as I know, you can't scrub audio or see the audio waveform in Daz.
Face capture apps look interesting but I only used pre-recorded and edited dialogue.
It's a real pain in the "but"!
Mimic Pro for Carrara works pretty well with Genesis 3 & 8 IMO
And using Fenric's BVH exporter actually works in DAZ studio as apparently it only moves the bones!
I have yet to get an iClone facial BVH to work but the Carrara one does on facial as well as body bones, Carrara does enjoy a closer compatibility with DAZ studio in that respect as DAZ collada exports of DAZ/Poser content largely works in DAZ studio too as does with some issues Carrara rigging unlike other software.
Mimic live works with G8..BUT..the only way to use pre-recorded audio is to pipe it in from a second computer sound card (via a two
headed 16 mm audio cable.)
And there is only a global strength adjustment
and no phoneme replacement/editing or live scrubbing &audio wave form Display in Daz studio.
And with due respect to Carrara loyalists, Carrara,Like Mimic pro 3, is more vestigial Daz,necro-ware at a development dead end, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to move on to modern solutions.
These are the exact reasons why I moved to a different Character Eco system with unified set of audio based ,modern lipsync&facial animation tools.
So, any chance one could use Mimic Pro for Carrara on a G8 character and export/save just the lip sync animation to Daz Studio, or is that another "but"? (And it doesn't look like G8 works natively in Carrara?)
you need the character solution Misty has at Renderosity that has had the strangely spelt node names on some bones edited and Blended weight applied.
Its the mismatch in node names that crashes Carrara and Blended weight adds triax which C8.5 can use.
in Carrara you need Fenric's BVH exporter he has made available for free as well as Carrara Mimic pro.
Unfortunately a recent buyer has not been able to get a serial number from DAZ so this is not a good time to buy stuff they don't want to support.
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/freestuff/?item_id=77504
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/freestuff/carrara-compatible-character-preset-for-genesis-8-male/77745
It would have been nice to have more of a close-up, but that looks really, really good. To my eye, it's better than what I've seen from Facemojo.
A BVH file exported from Carrara/Fenric cannot carry facial viseme morphs and trying to import only the G8 face rig animation will
still miss alot of important facial movements
The free Daz script to use the papagayo utility output can yeild decent base layer results (after some initial set up) and if you are willing to hand key facial expressions on top of the lipsync
it is obviously the cheapest Audio based solution for G3/G8 (Free)
Also the papagayo interface has a huge audio waveform display
for you to line up your speech text and real time scrubbing
with the little proxy mouth in the upper right corner that plays the lipsync in realtime.
Where is this free DAZ script to use Papagayo?
Looks like Renderosity has the scirpt. I might give it a try. I mean, the price is right! ;-)
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/freestuff/?item_id=77470
https://www.mohoanimation.com/papagayo.shtml
--Tim
Thanks
I was correct: the price is right. Back to V4.
If you are sticking with V4 for animation in DS and have not updated to DS 4.14 some people have reported some problems with the Mill 4 generation in 4.14 in this thread.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/459596/support-for-gen4-in-ds-4-14#latest
Okay, so I buckled down and gave the iClone lip sync another try, and I have to say I am pleasantly surprised by the results. The trick (for me) was to just delete the automatically-generated phonemes and just add them manually. The auto-generated phonemes were mostly garbage--it's more work to fix them than to start from scratch.
Wolf, I was able to solve the "oversize eyes" issue by converting to CC3+ and use "fix eye close" function.
V4 brought into iClone (along with a bit of Shakespeare):
Excellent!! Glad you found a solution Tim.
Now at least you have the option of moving up to G8 figures Via
CC3 conversion.
You can even Alembic export from IC 7 to C4D .
Thanks, Wolf! Yes, opens up a lot of new possibilities. The FBX from IC 7 is actually pretty good, but so far I can't get "Look at" to work on an FBX figure in C4D, so Alembic might be the only way to do it right now.
I just saw the discussion and wanted to contribute something as a manufacturer of Anilip2. We use 2 different technologies to generate phonemes / visemes.
Because the automatic generation of visemes is anything but trivial, we have a very sophisticated viseme editor in Anilip 2, where many aspects of the viseme animation can be adjusted. If you like, you can take a look at some aspects of the editor here in the tutorial.
The Anilip 2 community is growing and we are accordingly taking care of the further development. For existing customers we just put an big update 2.1 online today.
We believe synthetic voices and automatic lip animation are the future. Mocap solutions (we are working on them ourselves. see aniHead) always require some hardware and sometimes an (sometimes expensive) actor. We are therefore continuing and already develop on a new version of Anilip
The requirements for lip animation are very different, but we believe Anilip 2 is a good solution for most needs.
Based on the the advertisement video for Anilip2...lets just say I'm less than impressed. Why won't Daz update Lip Sync? It seems to work better than anything else I've seen so far. Here is a clip from a movie I've been working on, using LipSinc and Genesis 2. https://youtu.be/OGICfr8hhzc