With the latest edition of this venerable lip-synching plugin, tight integration with its new host program gives more control over the results than ever.

Phonemes are the essential building blocks that make up our speech. Lip-sync package Voice-O-Matic, now available for XSI, works by identifying the phonemes within an audio file. Each phoneme or group of phonemes is then mapped to the corresponding mouth shape, or viseme.

The intensity of each viseme can be controlled individually, making it easy to emphasise or tone down a specific shape. While voice-O-Matic can recognize up to 40 distinct phonemes, it includes a preset with the nine most basic, which may be all you ever need. A major difference between this XSI plugin and its long-standing 3ds max counterpart is that you can use any animatable parameter in XSI. While plugin can only use a single parameter for each viseme, the seamless integration with XSI makes it easy to sidestep this limitation by using compound clips, custom parameters, expressions and so on. As Voice-O-Matic simply animates the weight of the different shapes using standard key frames, the resulting animation ca be handled as you would any animation in XSI.

Voice-O-Matic is easy to use and can produce impressive lip sync straight out of the box, even with a low number of mouth shapes. Although it supports most languages, it tends to require more work if you’re using a minority language. Even so, its sure to save you a great deal of time in any of your lip-syncing projects.