"Three professors in speech technology developed a way to extract mouth- and lip-position data from a voice signal," notes Mike Helpingstine, LipSinc's vice president of business development. Incorporated in early 1998, LipSinc began as a project in the Tech Program at North Carolina State University. (A fourth product, Face2Face, was scheduled to ship this summer from Face2Face Animation.) Although each takes a different approach to automating lip sync, all enable animators to create believable expressions and mouth movements for digital characters. Some of the newer tools that are enjoying widespread use among production facilities today are LipSinc's Ventriloquist, Third Wish Software's Magpie Pro, and Famous Technologies' FamousFaces Animator. Luckily for animators working in these markets, several software tools are now available that enable them to accurately sync lips to dialog without suffering through the notoriously laborious (and therefore expensive) process of keyframing. Viewers expect all lip sync to look believable, even in TV series, commercials, and games, which don't have the long production cycles and large budgets of features."įamousFaces, used to lip sync this warrior from the game Empire Earth, is just one program that helps remove the drudgery from lip syncing. "Because of movies like Antz and A Bug's Life, which had some really good lip sync, the bar has been raised. "Today, everybody expects realism in character animation," notes Zac Jacobs, vice president of product development at Famous Technologies, which markets software for lip sync and facial animation. And thanks to the latest crop of software for lip-sync animation, making 3D computer-generated characters talk in a realistic manner is becoming not only cheaper, but also easier and quicker to accomplish.
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