Hi, I'm getting way ahead of myself here, but I just wondered if anybody knew of any good mouth-movement tutorials. What I mean is the kind of mouth movement that is used in Half-Life and Deus Ex when a character talks and the jaw of the mesh moves. I know this is probably theoretically quite simple - just add an extra bone for the jaw and assign the right vertices - but I looked on PlanetHalflife and PlanetDeusEx and did a web search, but couldn't find any tutorials on how to set it up correctly. I won't be at the stage of making characters talk in my game for a year or so, probably, but I'm modelling the lead characters now and figured I should take this into account.

Any help or pointers to tutorials much appreciated,
Keith

do a search on "phonemes" and animation... there should be quite a bit out there showing you how to set up the lipsync with specific animation packages so you will have to adapt it to 3DGS.

Thanks for the reply, mbee... I've actually got quite a good tutorial on mouth shapes for phonetics (one of the great Michael Comet tutorials) - it wasn't so much the mouth-shapes of sounds I was looking for as a specific tutorial on low-poly animating of mouths. I tried your suggestion of looking for phonemes and tried searching (Google) with "phonemes, animation", "phonemes, half-life", and "phonemes, deus ex" amongst others, but still can't find what I was looking for. I did find an interesting interview with the Deus Ex creators, though, who say that they used seven mouth shapes for phonemes in that game. Not that I'll need anything so complicated. Half-Life only seems to use two mouth-shapes (open and closed... duh). I know an easy way to do this is to 'animate' the skin of the model, but I figured that as there are so many Half-Life tutorials and models online, there might be a tutorial on how they actually modelled, boned and animated the mouths in that game somewhere on the net... It would be nice to have some decent mouth-movement, even if I'll probably never get any decent voice actors for tuppence each...
Thanks,
Keith

Well here's an idea (only an idea though, not a solution). What about just animating the skins? You would only need two skins with the mouth open and closed. I'm thinking of this because I remember riding through Disney's haunted house (California). They had a trio of singing heads on statues that featured a blank where the mouths were and a movie was projected on that part of lips singing. I'm not sure the mouth on a human opens far enough to make it worth animating as a low polygon feature (monsters are different though).

Just an idea-

[This message has been edited by mbee (edited 22 May 2001).]

Another idea is to use the poser plug-in called Mimic for Lipsinc.com. This plug-in lets you record your sound via a .wav file and then it automatically sincs the facial movements of the poser character. Once this is done all you have to do is either make a movie (AVI) within Poser for in-game use or export the model with facial animation to 3ds and re-importit into MED. Just an idea, I have the software but I'm using it for AVIs only at the moment. The software costs about $240.00 with shipping. Hope this helps.

Bill

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www.willsongraphics.com

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Originally posted by Ambit:
It would be nice to have some decent mouth-movement, even if I'll probably never get any decent voice actors for tuppence each...

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I don't know if he works for tuppence, but I've been meaning to put in a plug for this guy for a while.

Wally Fields of "Wallys Weird Voices" ( http://www.wallys.com ). I'm not sure what his prices are but he does some really good work.

That is some seriously weird stuff right there...