Hey everyone,

Apologies if this has already been asked but couldn't find an answer. Can the CrazyTalk animator's interactive animators be used with wordpress? My websites need to be wordpress for a number of reasons but I would very much like to use some crazy talk characters in the near future.

Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you.

Will

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, your question tells me you are maybe unfamiliar with the CrazyTalk interactive options, or what wordpress is, or maybe both - because the question doesn't exactly make sense as stated.

I'll try to be brief. Please forgive me if I say too much. I am only trying to help.

Wordpress is a system of php scripts that assemble your website. There's a script for the sidebar, a script for the main "loop" of information, and a database stored on a server. The system calls up the info to display it on the webpage.... Essentially, anything that can be displayed on a webpage can be managed with wordpress, or can be incorporated into a wordpress site, so yes. Wordpress can do it.

On the CrazyTalk side, there are a number of ways you can export:

video – the avatar video plays just like any other embedded video. You can use an HTML5 authoring tool like Tumult Hype to link videos together, and trigger them with buttons (etc). this is the most compatible option across web browsers and platforms, but there will be some hitches on certain platforms like ios tablets and phones, and some old browsers. Video export is standard with CrazyTalk. You do not need to buy any add on.

Interactive Avatar – this is a javascript system that uses the Unity WebPlayer plugin. It is similar in practice to using videos, but it exports special files for each animation. the control is more dynamic (and the files are theoretically smaller), and the character's eyes will follow the mouse when they are not playing a script (idle motion). The javascript is a bit more complicated, and you will need to hack some code into the header script of your wordpress site before you begin. Reallusion has some starter kit templates.... The Unity plugin does not work on iOS, Android, or Chrome browsers. They don't allow plugins and there is no getting around it.

Unity Importer – the 3rd option uses the Unity importer (a Unity3D plugin) to import the files that Interactive Avatar exports, allowing you to incorporate CrazyTalk characters in a Unity game. Unity can build stand alone apps for iOS and Android, Mac and PC, and it's web player plugin (see above) and WebGL which is a new web standard for 3D that does not need a plugin. We are waiting on an update to the Unity Importer for the current version of Unity5, but it is not out yet....

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your reply and you are right I know very little about the interactive plugin. I wanted to ask some questions about it before purchasing.

You say that you would need to hack the header.php of wordpress in order to get it to work. Are there any guides or anything explaining how to do this?

I predominantly want to use this plugin with my Unity apps but thought if Im spending all this money may as well integrate into my website too.

Thanks again

Ahh, so if you have Unity, here's the deal:
there are 2 plugins – an exporter for CrazyTalk, and an importer for Unity. To use inside Unity you will need both plugins. It's the Unity importer plugin that is not ready for Unity5 (nothing else has changed so CrazyTalk and the exporter don't need updating presumably).

The javascript thing calls Reallusion's website, and they provide a "prepped" version of the Unity Web Player that loads your animations and gives you some interactive controls via javascript. It embeds exactly the same as the Unity Web Player but it has CrazyTalk branding, etc. The "hack" is pretty simple, no different than embedding a Unity project (copy/paste some instructions on how the browser should handle the plugin). It's a way to use the export files without needing to know how to use Unity.

If you have Unity, I'm pretty sure that you will want to build everything in Unity. Just using the Interactive Avatar and javascript is going to be much less than what you can do in Unity. Your users still have to have the Unity player eitherway....