Bleetz (11/10/2017)

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Re: visemes for horse avatars... I've never done the RL free horse before, but it's certainly possible to set him up as a singer because he seems to have plenty of good mouth movement.

EDIT: Animagic beat me to replying, so I hadn't seen the spine until then, but this is exactly how the spines were for each of the horses below... I had to set up morphs and extra bones in other software to get the lip and jaw movements for the horses in the first 2 videos below... and the 3rd vid is an example of how it looks just using the method that Animagic mentioned (and I also explain below)

RE: Spine set-up... 
e.g. Here is another horse avatar which is supposed to be hyper realistic, even moreso than the RL horse (but I gave him a facial morph make-over to look a bit more toonish). This avatar has the most complicated bone structure I've ever come across - it literally has 2 complete skeletons inside it, so I haven't quite conquered it yet for the flapping mane and tail in the wind, but this short vid was just an early test of 3 styles of skeleton set-up in 3DX5 to check if the mouth and major body bones are working okay after manually setting up most of the visemes in Expression editor... - which is also why you may notice some differences in how the shoulders and hooves rotate using the same motion on each of the 3 horses... it can be a bit tricky trying to figure out which bones should be the shoulders and hands (especially in quadrupeds where their back legs aren't supposed to bend in the same direction as human knees, so the rotation of bones in 3DX can also be a bit fiddly)


Note: horses are a bit tricky to set up as a humanoid beside another character in a scene because they are just so tall. But it can be faked by sizing him down to about 1/2 to 3/4s and he'll still "look" as if he's the same size as he was as a quadruped in a previous scene, or even if you stand him up in the same scene... e.g. here is a quick test with a 1/2 size horse as a humanoid; 



I'm pretty sure the RL horse has a really easy skeleton for setting up the mouth, but even if he only opens and closes, with no additional jaw or lip motions, it's still possible to make the impression of singing. e.g. the toonish horses below have only very basic open/close and a small degree of rotational jaw (before teeth and tongue start to pop out), so in the video below I only use them as backing singers so viewers aren't really watching their mouths too closely... 

 

RE Music interfering with visemes. I avoid this problem in the videos by loading the music onto a prop in the scene. (I used to use the biggest or first prop in the scene list so it was always easy to find if I had to go back to the file many months later), but nowadays, I just load a primitive "plus" sign, switch it to dummy, change opacity to zero, so it's totally out of view (in the older versions of iClone... while iC7 all dummies switch automatically to zero) and re-name it "Music" so it's always easy to find and edit. 

Then the visemes for each character can be done by either;
a) adding an expression and manually adjusting the visemes for that...
    where copy-paste (or control-drag)  makes it easy for repeating choruses or words...
    and saving each new custom "expression" if you need to load it onto another character in the scene (must be the same spine e.g. Mrs Dobbie). 

OR BEST AND EASIEST: 
b) using the tts to type in the lyrics (or copy-paste them from a word document), and sliding the volume down to zero before clicking ok to add it to the scene...

Note: I get really accurate visemes if - instead of using text-to-speech- I record my own voice, and load that BUTTT, then we can't just render out the video with song, because the dummy voice track can also be heard... (unless there is a way to adjust volume in the timeline that I haven't found yet)... so doing it this way means loading all the voices and sound into the iC project (knowing it will sound like a mess), then rendering, loading it into an editor, deleting the whole sound track and then reloading just the music with pro singers. 

These tips work really well in iC5 and 6.
But sadly, manual viseme adjustments are much harder in iC7, I think, because the voice tracks can no longer be edited/broken/split/control-dragged... or if they can, it's faulty in mine.

Bleetz (11/11/2017)

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So I'm never sure what to post in the "showcase your work" forum now that everyone else has moved on to iC7. 

Bleetz (11/12/2017)

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Is there a deadline for this one..?