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Comments
Wow. I Love the 2D episodes - and the PlayHT voices are Really Good!!!
Bravo Walt!
Thanks, very much appreciated. The play.ht voices do help cover up some of the weaknesses in the animation, but at the moment the 2D is a lot of fun. I'm still hoping that DAZ Studio 5 can be as much fun as what I'm playing with now.
I'm just doing the voicework for another 2D cartoon now; it's a slightly different style of 2D characters and if it goes well, I hope to have another 10 minute epiosde of a different series up by the weekend.
-- Walt Sterdan
I love the 2D style you've chosen! It's highly entertaining and the stories are fantastic!
Big Fan!!!
That said, I also Really Love the 3D folks in the first two!
On my end, Rosie's coming Alive!
Wow! That's awesome, She was a fantastic character before, but you've really, really upped your game! Very impressive!
-- Walt Sterdan
Thank you so much! I really appreciate that, Walt!
EmotiGuy straight out of the box into Carrara, using an untouched Mimic Pro result - voice done using Talkia
Lack of a good lip sync option is why I don't animate with Daz anymore. I used Mimic Pro for over a decade, as the only option, but it was never updated in all that time. With some work, it actually did a decent job, but finally gave up hope Daz would ever come up with a good solution. I still use a lot of Daz assets, but I export them to compose in iClone, which has great lip sync capability.
This is an excerpt from a section of my latest series that I'm working on:
Looks fantastic, as always. I loved the first part that you posted earlier and I'm looking forward to seeing more.
For me, I'm only doing simpler toon stuff and even the ancient Mimic Pro is good enough for me; I'd decided when it first came out that I'd use it for the simple animations that I wanted to do and now that I finally have time to animate, it still does what I need except now I need an older computer to do it on, I can no longer hear audio in DAZ to fine-tune anything and I can't output a movie file with or without sound. I don't mind exporting individual frames but it's two more steps, one to merge them into a movie file and another step to add the audio. What originally was (for each audio file):
is now:
fire up old machine
open a character; for however many audio clips I have, repeat until done:
Transfer pose presets to new machine
For each audo file/pose preset, repeat until done:
I've give up on waiting for DAZ Studio 5 to do my little animations because literallly years were passing by. I'm enjoying 2D animation, quick, clean and if I wanted to put in a 40-hour "work" week I could probably have 15-20 minutes of animation done each week (I still have lots to learn, mind you, but I can see most of what I need to fix, so it's fun and I'm learning and will hopefully get better).
I still have hope that DAZ Studio 5 might bring back the features that I lost when it went to 64-bit, I'm just not waiting for it.
My hope with this thread was to find out what DAZ owns or doesn't own and what they might be *able* to do with Mimic. No one's jumped in to correct how I *think* everything works license-wise, so as far as I can guess DAZ could release a 64-bit plug-in for sale without violating any licensing (as they did with the Windows-only Mimic Live). I'd be happy to pay for it.
-- Walt Sterdan
Thanks, Wsterndan! I guess in the end as long as we're learning and having fun...
As for your Mimic workflow: ugh, exactly. They make you jump through flaming hoops. That said, your 3D lip sync looks pretty good--I guess if you work with the same software for 15 years...LOL. By the time I stopped using Mimic I think I got pretty good results--the trick turned out to be deleting a lof of extranous visemes. And patience.
As for willingness to pay for a lip sync solution, I wrote directly to Daz a couple years ago and told them I would pay--literally--$1000.00 for a decent lip sync solution. I finally went to iClone, which had a very good lip sync utility, and then they changed it--for the better! Daz couldn't do that in almost two decades.
I love the work that both of you do. Fantastic and inspirational!
I snuck in by Rosie just before bed and asked her to video record a line for me so I could do another PoseRecorder test.
Turned out really nice! I have written a bit of a mini-article on my thoughts and finding Here.
In short I am very pleased that I'm able to do performance capture instead of audio-to-sync.
Since it's a hobby for me and I'm retired, $1000 is a little high (it would have to be really, really, really good) but I'd definately pay $200 or more without hesitation, even for just the 32-bit lip sync option in a 64-bit DAZ (provided I could hear the audio in-scene).
I did a post-mortem on my first attempt with Hrimfaxi Adventures and found a few things that really stuck out as wrong; the .dmc I made for my custom figures appears to have "blink" and "eyes closed" cross-wired, making the characters simple blinks appear to have them squinting, and I applied expressions (e.g. "angry" in particular) that had morphs to eyes, eyebrows and mouth that doubled-up some of the lip sync morphs making for some dicey lip/teeth interactions. I'll probably take another run at 3D animation in DAZ Studio once version 5 is released just to see if it's any less painful.
In contrast, I'm just starting another 2D animation using a different style of simpler characters that I cobbled together and I did a quick voice test to see how they worked:
https://sterdan.com/2023/10/new-2d-character-style-for-pegasus-x5/
The one-minute clip took just over an hour to do; it's a very simple animation, but with four or five people interacting in a scene it's harder for me to do motion capture on the different people and look like they're actually talking to each other or just watching others interact in a scene. WIth the first 2D story I did, once I had my characters set up it took roughly 65 hours to do 40+ minutes of 2D video (none of it of professional qualtiy, but all of it fun to do). My stories tend to be dialogue-driven, so a 10 minute film will usually have between seven and nine minutes of talking. As I get more comfortable, I'll start having people move around a bit more, and most of my stuff still lacks decent secondary animation.
-- Walt Sterdan
Thanks! It's great checking in and seeing the work people do here--not a lot of us animators--LOL.
$200 would be a bit more reasonable. ;-) That's cool that you explore different styles and methods. In the end, we're just trying to tell stories, but the journey is fun as well. I love 2D animation, but I haven't explored it a lot myself--it's a very tough medium, traditionally. The earlier digital 2D software seemed pretty limited, but it looks like it's getting better, so I may have to jump in at some point.
My daughter just got Paramount +, which gives me access to the rest of Star Trek - Discovery and the rest of them.
I have to say, Strange New Worlds is looking Really Cool!!! I'm still at the beginning of the first season and am looking forward to this!
I also had no idea that The Lower Decks was an adult cartoon. Looking forward to trying that!
Something else that really grabbed me from that channel is the two season (so far) live-action Halo series! Wow is that ever cool!
I wonder why they have all of the Star Trek except for the movies (aside from the awesome new ones, which I already own). Perhaps they show them from time to time?
Oh well. One day I'm planning to just buy them all so I always have them.