Well, here he is, for better or for worse.
Ray here has had some minor improvements
to get rid of coincident surfaces in his mouth,
and of course he still needs ears, etc.

He is presented without sound as I don't have
a way to record it, but he is showing everyone
that he's smart enough to form his vowel sounds....
"a"..."e"...."i"...."o"...."u".....

Could anyone send me a short .wav file with the spoken
words "Happy New Year!"? As well, I need to
get a program from which I can tell (almost) exactly when
certain sounds are "hit" in that file....recommendations,
please.

Thanks.

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Attachments:
Download 'vowels.avi.dat' (695 KB)

a, e, i and o , look fine, not sure about the u tho

he needs more lip - even if its just a torus round the mouth part

Rick

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Could be that the mouth needs to start and end closed, not just remain open.
It looked very good besides, I could easily lip-read it if I pretended to
hear the spoken vowels (english of course).
I took a look at Frankenvic again, a similar concept to yours here, a
program so a character could speak what you typed in.  There was no name in
the archive of that so I took a guess at who had made it, Remco de Korte
apparently, my first guess.  I didn't see that particular frankenvic.exe
mentioned at: http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Eremcodek/vic.html

Bob

"Rick" <pov### [at] dialpipexcom> wrote in message
news:386c9807@news.povray.org...
> a, e, i and o , look fine, not sure about the u tho
>
> he needs more lip - even if its just a torus round the mouth part
>
> Rick
>
>

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omniVERSE wrote:
> 
> Could be that the mouth needs to start and end closed, not just remain
> open.
> It looked very good besides, I could easily lip-read it if I pretended
> to
> hear the spoken vowels (english of course).
> I took a look at Frankenvic again, a similar concept to yours here, a
> program so a character could speak what you typed in.  There was no
> name in
> the archive of that so I took a guess at who had made it, Remco de
> Korte
> apparently, my first guess.  I didn't see that particular
> frankenvic.exe
> mentioned at: http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Eremcodek/vic.html
> 
> Bob
> 
That program was made as simple demonstration of animated speech. I
tried synchronizing the movement with the sound but there are some
problems. In this case I based the synchronization on the typed text
which is of course not very smart. A character or series of characters
will be pronounced in more then one way according to the word, language,
dialect, etc. What it did show me was that when you simply have a moving
mouth it already does most of the trick. So to get a more or less
(semi-)realistic effect you're already 80% on the way if the mouth moves
with some extra points for other moving face- (or body-) parts. 
As Rick already mentioned it also helps if you start and end the
animation with a "rest" (closed mouth). It's quite easy to time this
right, especially programmatically. 
I have use this method with a series of speech scenes and I must say
that I'm rather pleased with the effect myself. A good voice-actor can
also do a lot.

While typing this I'm downloading the animation but it isn't finished
yet so I can't say much about that.
Oh, wait, it's in....
8)

It looks very good, you have a very smoothe moving mouth. The moving
eyes add a lot. I think it would improve if you'd move the head with it
as well and as Rick said: close your mouth every once in a while ;)
I understand this is just a study of the vowels. With the consonatns(?)
you'd have other lip movements as well.
Great work!

Remco

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Head movements and eye movements will be trivial, I've just been too
lazy to put them in yet, concentrating on the mouth. I've already got
mouth positions for the other sounds, but just haven't used them yet.
As someone suggested yesterday, I'm trying to add lips, using sphere
sweeps in MegaPOV. Very non-trivial, especially for my math-atrophied
brain, but I know it can be done...we'll see if I can figure it out,
otherwise
it's off to povray.advanced-users to beg for help. ;-) As well, I'm fixing
to
jump back over to Colefax's site and check out the compressed mesh
and hair growth macros so my character doesn't need Rogaine. (TM)
I hope to have the lips, hair, etc. done by the end of the weekend
and when I do , I'll post something more. Thanks for everyone's help and
feedback.


Remco de Korte wrote:

[snippage]

> While typing this I'm downloading the animation but it isn't finished
> yet so I can't say much about that.
> Oh, wait, it's in....
> 8)
>
> It looks very good, you have a very smoothe moving mouth. The moving
> eyes add a lot. I think it would improve if you'd move the head with it
> as well and as Rick said: close your mouth every once in a while ;)
> I understand this is just a study of the vowels. With the consonatns(?)
> you'd have other lip movements as well.
> Great work!
>
> Remco

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