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.
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