Talking animation?

Hi there!

I am planning to do some SL video and I came to the situation that I wanted my avatar to explain something. So for the voice part I will simply take myself but it would look better if he'd be look like talking actually. I was thus searching for some animation which make it talking but all I found were just some which do make him look frowned or whatever.

So is does anybody know of some animation which makes an avi look like talking (or at least gesturing like holding a lecture or so)?

Any help appreciated!

-- tao

Sorry we are unable to animate talking as we cannot do anything but basic expressions that do not last long as we are uploading.

I would like to change the expressions of the character as well - that's a severe limitation that needs to be overcome, IMO

There is a product called "Mood Mixer" by Web Page, that can replace the chat animation with an explaining gesture, as well as randomly animate the face to smile and grin - I like the product, it adds a lot of life to a character. Still unsure how they were able to replace the chat animation but it does look more like the avatar is gesturing while talking.

I know that the animations is SL are based on Poser, and there is a tool out there called Mimic from daz3d you might want to check out. Sometimes you can find free 2.0 versions of it in the 3d mags. Might be worth looking into. It will create a pose file for poser that will animate mouths and facial features. You are talking a bit of work, but this might be help you out for machinima cut scenes and stuff. I'm going to investigate it myself.

I have Mimic, it's a nice product - but optimised for Daz figures only. You could import the SL avatar into it, but you'd have to render it out in a 3d program, you can't upload any facial morphs to SL.

Wish we could upload facial morphs to SL, or at least have a complete set of phonemes. *begs*

Thanks for all the replies.

Actually using mimic seems to be no option as you cannot upload that again it might be no option. But I will still look out for some version. I will also have a look at dazstudio and avimator to maybe make at least some gestures for my body.

I also wonder anyway how good it would look if the speech is not really matching the lip movement. Would be one thing to check out maybe.

I also got a reference to Mood mixer in the other thread in the machinima forum and will also have a look at that.

But I guess I will just try to be creative to find some way which

a) is not too much work in postprod (as lipsyncing via morphing would be)
b) doable within SL
c) looks more or less like I am explaining something (well, my avi of course

As I went for just some speech from the off for my first episode of my vlog I will try to produce something better then for the upcoming ones (though doing new episodes at all will have precedence of having them done perfectly as they would never be finished otherwise

So we will see what future will bring (maybe even voice chat in SL in which case LL will have to solve that problem for us

Daz Studio recently got BVH export, but I am having some export issues to SL. Talked to them and I have some things I have to try. If it works, I'll make it available here

Avimator looks good, I tried it the other day. I'm still using Poser for my BVH at the moment, but hopefully the Studio export issue gets resolved soon for me.

I used Avimator now to create some basic animation for my video blog. I now do it the reporter way of holding a mic and pretending to be talking. You can see it at http://taotakashi.wordpress.com/ or in-world at my Showroom.

I think this is working for me right now..

Tao, that's a great work! And thank you for intrducing us the flexible prims. I got it was cool. And of course, your voice was cool, too.