Sorry not to comment a little sooner but life has sort of beaten me up lately <g>.

I can well attest that voice actors do "act".  Perhaps the clearest piece of advice I can give in this regard is that it's okay to "overact".  I've directed a lot of various media, from stage, to film, to television, and there are a wide variety of styles even involved in all of those, but in general you play for the audience.  Someone might be watching you perform from the back row of a large theater and unless you really "sell it" they won't get much.  OTOH, if you play that same broadness for HD television, unless it's all about Three Stooges level material, it will look ridiculous.

Animation is mostly very broad, though.  If we are going with just the audio (no mocap) it will help to have as much expressiveness in the sound as possible.  And for mocap we have the ability to dial it down (through adjusting the expression and/or viseme track levels) but not really the ability to dial it back up.  So in nearly all cases I would recommend folks just "play to the balcony" (as we used to say).  It will look and feel extreme, but it will always be better for animation.  The voice track will "read" better and, if you're doing mocap, the expressions will look better.

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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

@justaviking
Yeah - thanks for the examples.

SeanMac

Thanks for sharing  the videos on "Voice Acting" I really enjoyed them!

sjonesdc :hehe:

STILL LEARNING!!!

It's "sharing time" again.

Here are a couple videos I watched (and enjoyed) recently that are relevant to iClone and animation...



VOICE ACTING:

Watching one short YouTube video does not replace hours of professional training, but this was very interesting.  In particular, the value of "standing" and "using your body" is very good to know.  (I usually stand when I do my final voice recordings.)  How many of us just sit passively at our desk and speak into a $2 microphone, and wonder why our characters seem dull and lifeless?


On that same theme, here is a video of numerous people doing their voice-overs.  Notice how much "acting" they do while recording the dialogue.


Also, notice you can't be shy or have any pride.  You need to be willing to totally embarrass and humiliate yourself while recording.  I struggle with that, even in the privacy of my own home, simply knowing people will be able to overhear me.  But the end result is definitely better the more you let loose and throw yourself into the role.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Fair point about external applications.

I was speaking mostly from a "humor" perspective because I found the video to be quite funny.  The previous one (v3) got over a million views.  No spectacular visual effects.  No complex storyline.  Just ragdolls being abused.  Strangely amusing.

I know people have requested a ragdoll capability in the past. so I figured I'd share the video.  It's not high on my list, but for falling down a stairway, or collapsing when a character gets shot, I can see it would be useful.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Assuming there is a way to export the FBX out of Blender properly into iClone (XChange?) I don't know why you couldn't set up the ragdoll physics there and use them in iClone (spoken from a position of divine ignorance in that I only use Blender as an import/export tool and know NOTHING about actually using it for motions and such).

I sometimes think we miss using external tools enough -- and, of course, with Python coming we may need to think more and more "outside the box that is iClone".

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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

Wow!  Now I KNOW that iClone really needs a good ragdoll option.  :w00t:  :)



I found this thanks to Andrew Price's (Blender Guru) "This Week in 3D" newsletter.

Favorite line:  "What a wonderful day!"

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I wasn't sure where to post this, and then I realized my Corner was as good as any.

I just got an email about the latest Substance Designer update.  Two items in particular caught my eye:

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

sonic7 (11/22/2018)

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I've experienced similar results, my 'fastest' render times being achieved with F7 fullscreen.
But as for the issue of consuming system resources for display purposes - when it can be better spent on the render itself - that makes a whole lot of sense.
I've added my 'vote' for Dennis' suggestion to the tracker...

Thank you.  :)

And thank you to everyone participating in this topic.

illusionLAB (11/22/2018)

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My 'reduced' size viewer renders achieved by making iC smaller on my desktop.  Today, I got completely different results!
<snip>
...notice how the app is only 10% bigger on the desktop in the second image... yet took 5 times longer!

That's horrifying!  Some days it gets stranger and stranger.  Regardless of the individual results we're getting, there is definitely room for improvement.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

(Oops.)

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD