Thanks for your info, Nicolas. I´m going through the Motionbuilder Help at the moment, looking through it´s
Audio-driven facial animation workflow options http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/motionbuilder2014/en-us/index.html?url=files/Animating_faces_Audiodriven_facial_animation_workflow.htm,topicNumber=d30e55972 Personally, I like working in Softimage a lot but I have to come up with something that is open, extensible and allows for easy progessive refinement as part of the modeling stage. I am leaning towards setting up Character Poses as individual viseme snapshots in Maya and then driving these with Voice-o-matic as a means of getting a block animation pass. That seems to have the least amount of overhead and be closest to spending as much time as possible actually creating and refining good phoneme poses compared to spending a significant amount of time setting up a more evolved system. I do want to avoid having to lock the model, then end up with Garbage in>Garbage out, it´s most important to have ways of getting at good poses and be able to refine the input poses easily by "just" adjusting a character pose and directly seeing the result updated in the blocked in the animation, i´m positive voice-o-matic will allow me to do exactly that. But now, this will have to wait. Opinion built. Request filed. Action tbd. Thanks for all you guys´ insights! Cheers, tim On 13.02.2014 09:22, Nicolas Esposito wrote:
I tried both Voice-o-Matic and FaceFx, but in the end I preferred to use Facerobot combined with the lipsync tool in order to have decent lipsync based on audio ( and text ). It can be tricky working with Facerobot but with a bit of trial and error you can get really nice results and have a basic facial animation without going crazy with all the options available. For Alien creatures it depends how ocmplex the mesh is, but generally it requires more setup with the regions, but other than that. Also you can easily create new phonemes and corrective shapes when you're importing the visemes, so honestly I would rather not buy Voice-o-Matic since I can do the same thing in Facerobot with Lipsync... Maybe thats why he dropped Softimage support, since the same toolset is already available 2014-02-13 0:02 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de <mailto:bauero...@gmx.de>>: Thanks guys, ufortunately, I have to wheight my good nature against a limited amount of time. The best voice-o-matic samples i´ve dug up this evening mostly revolve around toonish and on the edge examples of a character. whip is lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?__v=K1suyOYNMV4&list=__PL0D3D3A1137CFCF90&index=36 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1suyOYNMV4&list=PL0D3D3A1137CFCF90&index=36> The common tip I see repeated every time is to reduce the smoothing to 1. The end result in the above video would give me enough to test my viseme shapes. I´ll see if I can give the Maya Version of voice-o-matic a try. I like the patient way that guy from Montreal explains his thing. It might be possible to have a face robot control group to pitch against, even if only for a test (or to satisfy my short attention span and playfulness). I´m just the modeler but I want to be sure the stuff I hand over can animate nicely... But first, I want/have to get Fibermesh curves solved with Yeti and rendered in Arnold. Which is why I would pick the voice-o-matic Maya version. I can model *.obj wherever I want (my personal 3D-love tour) but at some point things will end up in Maya. Cheers, tim On 12.02.2014 23:34, Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote: FaceFX is using the exact same voice recognition library as what I used in FaceRobot. Of course, workflow is more important than voice recognition tech, The di-o-matic guy is quite friendly, we've talked a few time. It's his own custom voice recongnition engine. He's here in Montreal. It's worth talking to them. He might have dropped the XSI plugin due to lack of interest, I don't know. I've never heard anyone talk about the plugin. It says up to Softimage 2013. If you're a cheap bastard with loads of free time, you can get the data out of face robot with the ImportSpeech command without ever using Face Robot. But phoneme recognition is a tiny part of facial recognition and that's probably not worth the trouble. there is lip sync stuff in Motion Builder too, if you have the suite.
