Digital Art Zone

i can’t afford to employ voice actors for my animations, so, what i do is the following:

> create a computer-speak wav file (and .txt equivalent) of any phrase i want spoken in my animations, using DSpeech

> use that as input into MimicPro to create a .pz2 file of the character moving their lips in time with that phrase, i then apply the pz2 to the character when i’m animating it in DS or Carrara

> when i’m editing the final animation i add the speech to the movie as a textual subtitle. the movie itself is soundless. i use MS MovieMaker for the editing process

now obviously i don’t want the actual wav file sound included in the animation, it’s just there to guide MimicPro. Carrara doesn’t take any notice of the wav file (which i’d have to manually add to the timeline if i wanted the sound to be included), but DS rather annoyingly does

i can see that you can manually edit the pz2 file to remove the “Soundfile” entry that points to the wav file, but there must surely be a better way?

any ideas?

I believe there’s a bug in Lipsync (or there was until recently) that saving the file in DS and reloading it would lose the audio, so you could use that. Not sure if it has been fixed yet.

thanks for the reply, but the solution sounds more faff than just manually editing the .pz2 file

i do find it rather surprising that there isn’t a separate soundline in native DS, or if there is you don’t seem to have access to it

it’s possible to add and edit sounds in aniMate2, but that doesn’t help me with manipulating MimicPro pose files