Morphs ?

[Rogad]

Hi folks,

 

I'm trying to find a way to animate a talking head...

 

I wanted to do this with morph targets, so is there a facility built into LE ?

 

Or is there an alternative way to do it ?

 

Many thanks

[Josh]

This feature is not supported.

[Canardia]

You could make several face animations, and then mix them.

Or you could move the face bones with some sine curves programmatically.

[tournamentdan]

Or you could use a nice affordable mo-cap like

. I do own this but have not used it.

[Flexman]

At first I thought you meant Morph

[Rogad]

Bbbeeeeearrrr beeearrr.... oh yes I remember Morph fondly.

 

Sadly I am to much of a newb to do clever stuff like animations and sine curves.

 

I just wanted something simple like plug in a neutral mesh and set up a few morph targets. That's about my limit at the moment.

[Flexman]

Well if you have a mesh for the head, go one step further and add a bone for the jaw then experiment moving that bone to get your head to 'talk'. I've seen a few commercial products for doing this.

 

I remember something for DarkBasic called DarkVoices that was a system for creating lip-sync files, there's a video showing how the model was created, this might give you a head-start on how to approach this.

 

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2107

[Pixel Perfect]

Thats a really interesting link Flexman! From what I can ascertain their tool simply exports a set of phoneme data in the form of a sequence and in theory I see no reason why this couldn't work in Leadwerks if someone looks into the example Dark Basic code and writes the neccessary code to translate that into animation sequences. Of course you need to modify your existing models to have the necessary bones in the head but they provide video instruction to illustrate that. Having talking animated characters would be such a plus!

[Rogad]

Thanks for the link, that looks interesting