Hi Swoop.. and thanks for the information about Magpie!

Did you get a chance to see my other questions to you about your last post?

You also gave me this image showing a very good, Lip Shape Data, but how do I get to this in CT?

Hi Kelleytoons and thanks for the information.

I didn't see CT as a low end product, but I suppose that would account for some of the issues!?

I've seen Papagayo before, when I was looking at the idea of animation... but I think this is intended as a prompt sheet editor  for animator, rather than having a mirror in front of them, but I can see what you mean in terms of being an aid.

Swoop suggested Magpie pro by, ThirdWishSoftware, but although it certainly has some great feature.... especially the timeline disign and use, it doesn't seem to have had any development of the last 5 years and a lot as happened in that time.

I've been looking at Adobe's Character Animator... this is a simple, intuitive and different approach to animation and lip syncing. Interest that the new feature of RL Animator 3... is here too!?  Downside... only cloud version... cc and although the program is stand alone, you can't buy it as a stand alone! RL should check it out!? :)

My feeling is that CT is too esoteric in it's design... for example, I couldn't get to grips with the flags on the timeline and the speed and loop options. Although they looked like the same options in many other programs.... they don't work in the same way. Jeff from RL, did a great job at explaining this, but I still couldn't get to use them in my workflow... they were just so different!

RL should strip CT down... remove a lot of the stuff that doesn't make intuitive sense; make the timeline user friendly... can't stand zooming in, pressing play to review and it zooms out again and you have to start all over... frustrating and time consuming... It should look at the algorithm used to create the basic lip sync track... it adds too many phonemes.. needs basic ones inputed and then simple ability to edit, add, or delete.. Shortcut keys for this would be great help... and I'm still looking for this option that Swoop showed me: 



Thanks for you time again, much appreciated! 

Magpie is one of the programs I bought and used before Papagayo -- as I said, I have spent thousands of dollars trying to get good lip sync.

Papagayo will give you lip sync -- the cartoon mouth is only a representation of what it produces, not what it is intended for.  As you note, it's a bit of a clue sheet for animators but an automated one.  That is, it produces the phonemes so you can load them into AS and manipulate what you want (whether it's cartoon or not).  In the case of your dog animation, what *might* be possible (using the new tools in AS 12) is to create mouth shapes from the actual dog picture and then have Papagayo load in the right phoneme manipulation.  I say "might" because although I have AS 12 I haven't worked with it much (my own fault -- I haven't done much animation this year).

If I get the time I'll take a closer look and see how realistic that might be -- can you post an image of your dog here that you are trying to do this with?

But what I had suggested before was using the file that Papagayo produces (an ASCII file) and by reading the file yourself you could see what phonemes were required and then (possibly) set those in Crazytalk yourself.  I realize the start of this thread you were complaining that CT doesn't actually DO phonemes, so there is that problem, but if you had some kind of conversion table over what it does produce you might still be able to use this approach.  It would not be automatic, though, not in the same way that loading in that Papagayo file into AS would be, but it might be a start (although I have CrazyTalk I ONLY use it for the ability to create 3D heads, so I can't tell you anything about lip sync in it).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hi.. 

I've been working on CT all day and it has just about fried my brain! It just doesn't seem to be fit for purpose.... When I look at it and I put the audio file in and the image into place after going  through the setting up... I thought it should be simple!? I was happy to try and adjust the lip editions that CT had attempted, but this process seems just impossible! It's as if CT is fighting the user all the way... Not intuitive, or friendly at all!  I think I'll leave it tomorrow and go and do a bit of bomb disposal... not so taxing, or unprodictable! 

I'll put the image here... when the RL server up and running again.... but please don't feel you have to have a go.... I'm grateful for your input.. I'm waiting to hear from Swoop... I asked him some questions and if he could do a quick tutorial as he seemed to know what I was doing wrong!? Nothing yet!