Lipsynch software for Cinema 4D XL r8?

[Anadin]

As far as I am aware Magpie is it...

[AdamT]

With R8's .wav scrubbing/marking abilities, doing lipsync in Cinema should be pretty easy. Steve from Stanimation recently posted a short he did on Postforum and it looked great. He said that he marked the .wav file in a sound editor and when he imported it into R8 the marks appeared in the timeline. He also said that the new sound scrubbing feature wasn't helpful. :hmm:

Check it out: http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=6&i=67642&t=67642

[LucentDreams]

A man who knows a dope sheet is a man I am proud to meet. do you have a paper dopesheet? just remember that the timeline is simply a horizontal dopesheet, so really if you dope your lipsyncing down on paper it should be no issue at all. if you mean to quickly test the lipsync using generic mouth positions, while the ol magpie plugin did import the settings from magpie, you could just jot them down. Myself I have been using flash for my lipsync tests, but fortunately breakdown and doping is something I have been pretty good at so my dopes are pretty accurate without having to test out, tweak here and there.


Wish that C4D's timeline could be used more like a dope sheet, or that a dopesheet tool was available like in XSI. Soo handy.

[3dg]

I am surprised to hear that Steve thought the sound scrubbing in Version 8 was not helpful. I find it very helpful, and it allows me to keyframe to music quickly.

G.

[AdamT]

Originally posted by 3dg
I am surprised to hear that Steve thought the sound scrubbing in Version 8 was not helpful. I find it very helpful, and it allows me to keyframe to music quickly.

G.

I can't recall the specs. of Steve's machine, but that could have something to do with it. I haven't tried this feature yet but will shortly.

[Jan]

Why using Lipsynch software? The sound scrubbing in R8 is very useful. With PoseMixer and this sound-scrubbing feature is it possible animate speaking characters quite quickly. Before I got my R8, I had tried the Magpie Demo, but in my view, it is much easier (and faster) to use only R8 without any external software.

[bugzilla]

Many thanks to everyone who replied to my post. It looks like I will have to manually lip synch using markers audio scrubbing capability in R8. I'm sure that will produce high quality lip synch.

What I was interested in was the Dope Sheet method like Animation Master has. How it works is, you import an audio file. Then you type in the text the character will speak. Each word shows up as a moveable block like in a NLA system like Maya's TRAX or Lightwave's Motion Mixer. If there's a word that's not in the library, it shows up in red. You can set keyframes for that word from the phoneme morph targets you've created. Now the software knows the word, and if the timing is wrong, you can stretch the word out to take more or less time in the timeline. It doesn't produce perfect lipsynch, but it's great for roughing it out and the workflow is really fast.

Tell me what you think!

[LucentDreams]

oh, well thats poor terminology calling that a dopesheet, funny from a program called animation master :)

Anyways, yes this is possible, even better is you can make those markers in another app like protools or any sound editor cpable of markes, and whne you import the sound file in C4d they are already there. Cause lets be honest, as good as C4D's scrubbing can get, it will never match the abilities of sound scrubbing in an app like pro tools.

[CosmicBear]

i like animation:master alot, but never really got the hang of the lipsync-feature. in my opinion you get the best lipsync-results with a good breakdown and dopesheet. the most complicated/time-consuming-part is always to produce the phenomes themself, but with a little planning time and if you sit down and read your dialog before you start to produce them, you can save yourself alot of time.

[LucentDreams]

best animation to study for lipsyncing, is Ren and stimpy, and the muppets, most muppets are capable of open, closed, and sometimes a sort of ooo shape, and yet they have very convincing lipsyncs. As for Ren and stimpy, they have a standard 11 moth shapes to do all of their lipsyncing, and then adjust them to fit the scene/pose/expression

[H. Ikeda]

One of tough things may be the preparation of morph targets corresponding to phonemes, but it's the same situation for R7 and R8.
Other than that, if you have a sound editor, lipsyncing for a few lines can be done in both R7 and R8. Workflow can be: markers with phoneme names are inserted to an audio file using the sound editor (see below) -> the audio file is read into a sound track in the Timeline -> display markers in the Timeline with the command Markers from Selection -> assign a morph key for each position of marker according to the marker's name (i.e., phoneme).

In R8, even without a sound editor, we could use sound scrubbing and assign markers directly in the Timeline.

For lipsyncing with lots of lines, we may need two types of tools, one can automatically extract phonemes from a sound waveform, and another can automatically create keys on a morph track such as posemixer's according to those phonemes. I guess Magpie Pro can do them on some level, though demo doesn't have c4d exporter yet.
Generally, IMO the latter tool might be made rather easily, but the former may be difficult even with voice recognition technique.

[wuensch]

--the only problem is it is not yet connected to R8, so what I do is I print out the dopesheet from Magpie and sit down in R8, step through the frames and doubleclick on the P2P library in which I store the ponemes--
Thats not really taking long.
Although R8s lipsynching scrubbing is nice, you cannot beat Magpies easy and very fast (and half-automated like in AM) lipsynching.
Especially if you want to sinc more than a couple of sentences.
Maybe we should contact the Magpie -maker, see if he can come up with a new connection to R8-- should not be too hard, as all it would have to do is take the Magpie -data and apply it on a p2p-keyframe channel.
Olli

[H. Ikeda]

Hi Olli,

But, Magpie web site seems to say that the latest v1.25 has c4d export option (demo is still v1.20 though). And in c4d 'morph mixer' plugin, which we could get in plugin cafe (R8SDK includes it), can read a Magpie file. Am I wrong?

[wuensch]

--yes you can import with morphmixer plugin, but I assume that with R8 and MOCCA you would like to store your ponemes in the far superior P2P manager which is not supported in Magpie.
If Morphmixer is what you want, then it works, i guess (have only tested under R7).


Olli

[AdamT]

I prefer Posemixer to P2P, myself, but I can see the advantage of P2P for lipsynch. Will have to investigate how to use the two together....

[wuensch]

--the posemixer Obj with the sliders is just fine and you cannot substitute slider controlled animation (like for eyes etc) with p2p.
If you animate a mouth with bones and not morphtargets p2p is definitely the way to go as it offers superbly easy access to complex face poses.
The sliders of cours are still there, controlling grin or other additional animation that you can add spontaneously.

The magpie exporter does NOT export to the MOCCAR8 posemixer (as far as I know) but to the Plugin called Morphmixer (which works a lot alike).

There was no possibility to transfer the data to other options, even under R7 (I would have loved to use it with Vreels Morph plugin which has compressed morphs and is really nice).
My hope is that someone writes an importer to p2p, the Magpie file is plain tet so it should be manageable for someone with better coding abilities then I have.
For lipsync i found p2p to be just perfect.
Olli

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