CrazyTalk

I'm absolutely in LOVE with it. Who needs a man when I can make my AV talk back to me? Just kidding.

My Test Video

Eric Rice, aka Spin Martin, also blogged about hacking machinima in SL.

Interesting stuff.

So, if I buy the $150 software, what do I do next? What is the process from beginning to end?

Is this some sort of animated texture projection technique, or does it actually move your avatar's mouth in realtime?

Please explain.

Thanks
--Moebius

Ok, dug around the CrazyTalk material and rewatched your vid.

Looks like the software helps you animate your facial movements on a "snapshot" from SL. I didn't see any camera movements, so I am guessing that this is all post process.

Am I close, or did I get fooled by smoke and mirrors?

It's all post-processing. You use a snapshot from SL and animate it in CrazyTalk. It only animates the face and shoulders. If you're super-sneaky, you can take a pic of yourself in front of a greenscreen, animate the pic in CrazyTalk and then chromakey it in an editing program. Then you put that video concurrent with another video of like a fixed location where people are moving around or a water fountain is moving. Looks pretty decent.

Hehe, that's great Moo, Im pleased these things are being experimented, I tried this too a while back and posted the result in another forum thread #17.

A rough post-production lip-sync test, but this was done using MorphAge software, (for Mac).

I made a fool of myself by videoing my singing; traced the mouth movement keyframes, and applied the result to a still image taken in SL. The result could be convincing with a little time. ATM you can preview it here.