Virtually speaking

Sunday, December 23, 2007 / by

I've been looking into machinima making recently and I think one of the biggest SL limitations in this field is lack of avatar lips movement while speaking. So far I knew about CrazyTalk (as of programs improving this disadvantage), but just recently I came across this movie:



Does anyone know what program was used to create lips movement in this movie? It seems like the best choice at the moment.

I've been wondering about various alternatives for external programs too, and what I came up with is an idea of a typing overrider (or maybe just some kind of device), that would use built-in avatar face expressions to simulate speaking. This means no lip-sync, just lips movement, but it also means it would be widely available for other SL users, be inexpensive and would make the post-editing less time consuming (most likely). While simple lips movement might not be good enough for some people, I think it would still be more natural than no movement at all. I actually saw a movie that seems to use this technique and it looks pretty good (the movie itself is a pilot of a new promising Second Life TV show "NooB"):



I'm going to play a bit with the idea and see what I can achieve (seems like an interesting challenge). In the meanwhile, feel free to give any comments and suggestions.

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