when crazytalk characters are not talking they play an idle animation, the head moves about in a natural manner, I import my own wav to make my character talk, his face will talk, no head movement, just the mouth, so I change the mood to cute, the face is now more animated, but we don't have idle animation, ie the head slightly looking up and down or looking left to right, when the character is not talking, when one isn't doing anything, the character plays a default idle animation, but when the character talks, we don't get that.

In model/face profile/ we can add motion strength, that gives the character an idle animation, but for what reason, because I don't see anyway to have that in our character, its just for when we view the character while we set it up, but come to making your own character speak, its not there. Perhaps we can add the idle animation in the time line, but I don't see i in the list, so Ive no idea how we get our character to play the default head movements, ie the idle animations that we set the character with in model/face profile/. My talking character just don't have the head movement at all for talking.

What can we do here, am I missing something?

Hi,

To create facial animation to accompany the vocals you basically have two simple options. The first is to use Puppeteering to create the animations as the project plays, or if you don't wish to do that yourself, you can use the pre-made Motion Clips and add those to the Timeline for immediate effect.

Depending on the version of Crazytalk you are using will determine how detailed your Puppeteering can be. In the standard version it is more limited than the Pro but you can still get some great facial animation either way.

There are full instructions on using Puppeteering and Motion Clips in the Help Guide. Just press F1 when in Crazytalk and look at the section entitled Creating A Crazytalk Script.

Alternatively go to the link below and watch the bottom 3 tutorials which cover these features. Once you have watched these tutorials I'm sure you will get the hang of it very quickly.

http://www.reallusion.com/reallusiontv/ct/tutorial.asp

Good luck.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Ill have a look at those.
Though making every little head flinch though puppeting would take forever, I think what I mean by idle animation is being understood.

Idle animation, - tiny movements. not large head turns, so I do not think puppettering is the answer, if you go to youtube do a search on crazytalk you will see lots of amateur made clips, basically people just playing around with the program, you will notice the heads do lots of tiny movements, they have not done this with puppeting, it would take hours and wouldn't even be done right.

Ill post some examples as I think this will be lost to some.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbY3OfFrvmE&feature=related][/url]
see the head, lots of 'tiny' movements, 'constant tiny movements', it is not animated to look left and right with puppetering, it has an 'idle' animation, you see this when setting up the character, when you assign its profile strength, there is also a movement slider, I forget it's name, sliding this up and down increases this idle animation, now at this stage its fine our character moves its head in a natural way for an 'idle animation', then we assign a sound file, now this is when it turns into a corpse, its head is static, and just the mouth goes up and down to the words 'no idle animation of the head', its very robotic and unnatural, I notice under personality its marked as neutral, so I change it to cute, right, its got some movement, the eyes and mouth are more animated, but no idle animation, the head is pretty rigid, also what If i don't want it happy or sad, I just want it to talk, well big problem, as neutral turns it into a robot, I guess we can use an emotion and turn its settings down, that gives it some character, at least more that its mouth moves, but what about the subtle head movements, they are not there, in that clip above, it moves its head with tiny slight head movements, that's what I want. I want to control those slight 'natural head movements' how is this done, why do we add these when setting the character up, but in the final puppet its not there. Just how do we add the natural tiny head movements, having a character with a static head that's totally unmoving doesn't cut it.

I think you will find with practise that Puppeteering doesn't take ages. Puppeteering takes place in real time (or half speed) so if you have 3 minute video it will only take that amount of time to put down the basic facial animations.

I also referred to using Motion Clips. If you use one of these you can then adjust the Intensity Slider to mild which will make the animation just like the standby motion.

I think the clips you refer to on YouTube may well have been made with Crazytalk 4 which automatically applied standby motion to a script. In Crazytalk 5 with its advanced facial animation, the standby motion is not applied automatically as the user has much more advanced realistic animation available through the features mentioned above.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Hi Fallen Angel,
I know what you mean; the animations that play while we sit there doing nothing are so cute; if there was only a way to record that. I just bought the program a few days ago, and it's really cute. I wish there was a way to record those animations that play while I sit doing nothing. When I try to animate in the same way as the program does while I"m doing nothing, I get funny looking characters. I even tried to pause at the beginning of voice recording, hoping that the default animation would play until I start talking, but it doesn't. It would be so nice to be able to record that "resting" look.
Kat

You can collect and save the idle motions by using the EMOTIVES and a Silence Clip that can be saved and re-used.

An attached image showing all areas used with hopefully a map on the steps taken and an inset of the emotives after being added to the character is attached. See if it helps.

SKYPE ID: rc.650

http://city.reallusion.com/store/ModuleExpand.aspx?id=GS634545170497417354&mdid=18866

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Cricky, I tried this and got an error; "Emotive need voice wave to analyze and generate the key."

Right. Just create one with your microphone muted. Then you have a Silence Clip that is believed to be a voice by CT, but in actuality has no lip motion because there is no vocal.

SKYPE ID: rc.650

http://city.reallusion.com/store/ModuleExpand.aspx?id=GS634545170497417354&mdid=18866

http://city.reallusion.com/ContentTag.aspx?tagname=Cricky&AuthorID=20081020688550191201#]Reallusion Store Content

" If I had Alzheimer's (Old Timers), would I know it? "