Subject: Re: Talking Objects
From: "Paul Davies" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 95 11:46:50 EST

<snip>
> How do you go about morphing the different heads 
> in and out in time to the soundtrack? 
<snip>

The best way to this is through careful planning. Study your audio track, break 
it down into phonemes - significant sound units - and determine when and for how
long each occurs. It's best to do this with a window dubbed video tape. Make a 
chart which indicates frame times for these phonemes and use it as a reference 
for creating morph envelopes for your different head objects.

I think the morphing solution has a higher production value than bones provide 
because once you have created morph targets for standard phonemes and 
expressions you can re-use them for almost any scene involving that character. 
The biggest pitfall for this solution is memory usage. Shamus Culhane 
illustrates 12 basic mouth positions for animating english dialogue in his book 
ANIMATION FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN - if you're doing character animation you should
have this book. These positions only account for a smiling character, you may 
need to add 12 more positions for each different expression. Now multiply that 
by the 3288 polygons - the number of poly's in a clown head I'm currently 
working on - not to mention the textures and the other objects in the scene and 
you've got one enormous memory suck! :+)
If we could only append object and bone motions from one scene to the next... 
How 'bout it Allen?

paul d.

Paul Davies
Artist/Animator
CapDisc  Bethesda, MD.
[email-masked]  or  uunet!capitol!davies