Loading ...
Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4
Thanks to moo Money, I was pointed to this amazing piece of software called Crazy Talk 4, which is able to do all sorts of very creative lipsynching, very easily, using just a few pictures uploaded from Second Life (or… well… basically anything, really!).
Sadly, this is the sort of company that still believes that the only computer platform that exists in the universe is Windows, but alas, what can one do? If you’re a Windows user and interested in machinima using Second Life, you’ll love this application. The trial version works for quite a long time, and the cheapest version costs around US$50, so you won’t need to starve and do a double mortgage on your home to buy it 
Here is an example of what you can do:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4176801776856484283Link to streaming video (if the above link doesn’t work)
Cool, isn’t it? The amazing thing, of course, is that this is a rather “lightweight” application, it also works with any language whatsoever (even with rather bad sound clips, which is the case of this movie), and it’s blindingly fast in “real-time” rendering of expressions. Linden Lab, once more, should look at what people are developing these days, and see how to incorporate all those fancy niceties into SL…
Stay tuned for more amazing things done with Poser 5 figures — and keeping us imagining how SL will look like in 2010 
Funstuff!
Gwyn I think you mean “moo Money”?
(Altho the thought of lunar commerce is quite appealing!)
September 4th, 2006 at 9:20 pmAck! Of course you’re right, Torley — how silly of me! Apologies to moo Money for the typo.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:33 pm[...] Here’s a little behind the scenes video of a new technical development - moving lips! Check it out. We were playing around with Crazy Talk today and filmed this little piece. Thanks to Gwyneth Llewelyn for reminding us of the video that Moo made using Crazy Talk. Now that we can run Windows on our Mac we’d figure we’d give it a try. Tags [...]
September 5th, 2006 at 3:12 pm2010, Gwyn? Why not 2007? Why can’t we as a SL community figure out how to plug in software like this, or like that of Logitech’s face recog. software, directly into AV facial expressions?
September 7th, 2006 at 2:19 amWell, the Bedazzle group did get a special client that mapped media textures to avatar’s faces, so we know it’s *possible*. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to Ventrella’s amazing physical avatars first, and we’ll see what comes next. By 2010 I hope that LL will be able to implement avatars with hair growth groups and customisable meshes like under Poser 5
and morph targets for infinite variation on facial emotions — so you’d basically be able to express *anything*. They can do it easily — the issue is, of course, *performance*.
This would be the state-of-the-art of 2004 implemented in SL — so, yes, 2010 is a good date for that
September 7th, 2006 at 9:36 amMy apologies to everybody who did not manage to see the video. Seems that the built-in editor of WordPress is quite good at mangling the embedded objects so much, that they almost always become useless! From a working version that displayed correctly under all browsers, it refused to work on Firefox, to slowly degrade to not support any other browser but Safari (one of the least used browsers in the world, but I happen to be one of its regular users!).
After much tearing of hair (virtual hair, that is), I simply gave up. There is supposed to be a plug-in to make these things easier, but the ones that I’ve installed seemed to prefer to invent new and more creative ways of mangling embedded objects, so… you’ll just get a plain, old-fashioned link that happens to work
Ah well. I’m always learning new things! Again, I’m sorry about that.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:02 amHmm it seems that I’ve managed to get the video link to Google Video working. Hooray for WordPress!
November 9th, 2006 at 2:26 pmAnyone know of a application like Crazy Talk for the Mac?
July 17th, 2007 at 7:28 amWell, sadly, Michael, the only thing that I know that does lipsynching on a Mac is Poser 7, but it doesn’t work like Crazy Talk at all…
July 20th, 2007 at 9:44 am