Q: Can anybody help me to make a Bar of Chocolate talk please? It will be used for a conversation between the bar of chocolate in the fridge and a Fat lady, longing for "him". Fat lady will be real life (My Wife!!).

I have no idea how to start as I do not have photo/face to start with. I am a newbie to CrazyTalk and got this "almost" only to do this job. Now i have it I can see so much more to do with it. Great program. I am very much into video, have done a little animation (Stop Motion)

Hmmmm, not so sure I should help you, as this sounds somewhat cruel (are you trying to taunt your wife, teach her a lesson, or merely have fun at her expense? In any case, even if she SAYS she is okay with this, I would never do this as no matter what she professes deep down inside she will be hurt).

But assuming for a moment you are going to use a picture of ersonName w:st="on">ersonName w:st="on">JackersonName>ieersonName> Gleason as the fat person (dead public figures are always fair game :> then you have a couple of issues. First, as you've surmised, is you need an image of a bar of chocolate. If you're going to use a real image of a person, chances are you need a realistic chocolate bar, so go take a picture of one (I'm sure you have a digital camera) or Google Image until you find something suitable.

With Crazy Talk that's almost all you need, as you can let CT substitute it's own eyes for your non-existent ones, as well as teeth (if you so desire). When you bring up the image of the bar you won't have any visual anchors to use, so be creative and just put the eye and mouth dots where you want eyes and a mouth. Then go in to Advanced Facial Features and uncheck use eyes and pick the eyes you want (same for teeth if you want 'em -- a chocolate bar with teeth is a little too ironic for my tastes :>.

Here's what I did with a yogurt container image I found on the web:

No, it wont be my wife, she is cuddly (as we are both) but not fat. I have a lady in mind that does movies for me, not an actor but incredibly talented.

Thank you for that tutorial. That will really give me a kick start. The one question I need to ask is (It is very late down under (Australia) and i do not want to open CT now or i will be very tired in the morning).

Do I presume that just mouse clicks will give me the original eye and mouth position or do I have to click a function button first

When you bring an image into CT the first thing it does is show you a screen to crop and/or adjust it -- I always use Photoshop first so I just blow by this one, but if you want to use the (very) limited tools in CT go ahead and do so.

After that you are given a screen to place four dots -- one at each outer corner of the eyes, and one at each corner of the mouth. That's it -- CT will then attempt to find features within those parameters.

In the case of the yogurt container (or your chocolate bar) it didn't find any features so just made a guess. That's what you then go into edit. As it turns out, nearly every CT figure needs to be edited anyway to look best, so I don't deem this to be any big deal. Editing only consists of moving around the little points on the various features and is about as simple as anything you'll ever do in software (about the only "catch" is there is a simple and a detailed mode of editing -- you'll nearly always want to use the detailed mode).

Even with a complicated character it shouldn't take more than a minute to fully make it come to life.

Ah, That solves it. i did not realize that the dots appear on everything. I thought that they only appeared on faces!

Yep, Photoshop is a standard tool for me. All my photos go there first.

I will be green screening the chocolate bar as it has a few travels to make before its final demise!.

Thank you for this, my first contact with the CT Forums. It has been a very good experience.

Today i heard that school kids wizz around this program as if it were joined to their finger tips. It does not do that for me who is well into the other end of the age spectrum! I have another question that i will put on a separate thread.

Its a great fun program, isn’t it? Loving it.

Hey, I'm probably the oldest guy on this forum (at least I seem to be the only one who's retired :>. I can see a lot here that would attract kids, because it's the easiest way I've ever seen to do facial animation.

Biggest problem with CT is it's so very good it gets you wanting more and the basic limitations are going to be hard to overcome (after all, it's really only 2D animation and that's not going to change). iClone is an effort to do for 3D what CT does for 2D, and while it's amazing for the cost it has a long way to go before it will ever be as slick as CT is in terms of the final image quality.

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