Facial Animation Software Question?

Mark Dygert

I've been looking into different facial animation packages/plug-ins and I keep coming up short on features or flexibility. So I'm wondering if anyone else has banged their head on this brick wall and managed to put a dent in it (the wall, not your head).

Needs:
- 3DS Max compatible
- Bones or Morph targets
- Ability to parse audio files and match up animations (lip Sync)
- Ability to store libraries of animations and expressions.
- Ability to recall these animations easily since we have roughly 25hrs of dialog per game.

Software I have found:
www.di-o-matic.com
Pretty easy to use, if you stick to the heads it makes, using custom heads is a pain in the ass.

www.lifemi.com
The best I have found, and at a good price, however the trial is really limited and doesn't let you fully test it out using your own custom head. The trial is missing the facial creation software, and the Muscle plug-in to even start looking at the heads it uses.

www.ims3d.com
Looks like ass, is expensive and looks cumbersome to implement. Not to mention their website is annoying as hell. I seem to remember this is what Valve first started with? Man those guys have a knack for polishing up turds.

Any suggestions?

HELP!

hehe

Mark Dygert

Thanks to Shibu Menon over at CGTalk I found the perfect solution. www.annosoft.com mixed with some of Shibu's Max Scripts it makes the process almost painless, almost...

Eric Chadwick

Hey that looks pretty good. I haven't done lipsync since the Magpie days, which seems to have come a long way.

Hopefully your work will look as good as the TF2 vids!

Eric Chadwick

Hey, I was looking in maxplugins.de and saw FaceFX. Looks like the batch support might be helpful for big jobs, and seems to support Max.
http://www.oc3ent.com/

Richard Kain

Ah, you found Annosoft. I've used their free C++ phoneme command-line program to produce some facial animations in Flash. I just had to create a parsing program to convert the output of the lipsyncer into an actionscript array. Annosoft's lip-syncing software is quite capable. It spaced out the timing of my audio files very cleanly, with no need for manual manipulation. (a big plus over software like Magpie)