Moho Animation Forum

That's a good suggestion about using hotkeys to trigger predefined actions, Hayasidist. I think trying to queue up multiple actions might be difficult to manage in real-time, though. I think you would be better of allowing an action to be triggered before the current one is finished and let the script mix the actions together like my MorphDials script does. You could even use a modifier key to make the action loop. I think you could create some pretty interesting combinations even with just a few basic actions, which I guess is the basis of puppetry.

Also, I disagree that you would have to adhere to a standard for the set of actions that would have to be supported. You could easily just have a text file that contains a map of shortcut keys to actions.

About the lip-syncing, I'm sure it could be done in real-time. After all, you really only need the front end of a speech recognition engine, since there's no point going from speech to phones to phonemes to words then back to phonemes to get the visemes. I think you could just go speech to phones to visemes. In fact, since it's puppetry, you might be able to get away with just using the volume to control the mouth, like AS used to do before it got a more powerful lip-sync engine.

Also, DK, that Animata software does look pretty good. Since it's open-source and built for the task, I think it would be a lot easier to build your platform around it instead of AS, but it would require getting familiar with it first. I'm sure it would be a lot better for supporting specialty controllers, like the kinect or a 3D mouse.

Well...I know this is not perfect but take a look at the wink demo I just did on my computer with AS and a copy of my pre animated wienertoonz character all done in real time.



Wink demo here:

http://www.polliefillers.com.au/forum/Wienerpuppet.htm

I know this is low tech but the results are fine as I can pre animate anything I like. All I did was set the timeline to run in AS and then scroll through the pre animated layers.

Doing the lipsinc will be tricky. Just a simple open close mouth based on audio level like Rudiger said would be fine for a puppet. Any ideas on how to implement live audio lipsinc across multiple layers????

Cheers
D.K

What Timely conversation.......Anyone played with the muppet characters on googles search page today?

D.K

Update:
That Google Henson tribute got me rethinking things....
I have just found all the necessary code to create an interactive 2D Flash puppet complete with live audio feed operated mouth. I just wish I had enough AS Lua knowledge to do this in AS but it's always that Flash Actionscript factor that wins over AS all the time when it comes to interactive animation. However...I will still be doing all the 2D vector atrwork in AS.

Cheers
D.K

Yes I had a look at that tribute, well done I must say. At first I thought it was flash, but it is really images with JavaScript.

That sausage animation looks cool, but it needs a better interface, something similar to morphdials, where you drag a bone to the different actions and sort of blend them!

I have long wished that anime studio could be a realtime puppetry animation solution.
As others have suggested, the ability to have set animation blocks available to be actioned in real time would be amazing.

Imagine if you could start recording and click your way through pre set animations to lay down your character actions in one pass then return to the start and do the same for head animations, eyes, hands etc. A different animation pass for each different character mode
Also a character movement mode where you could start recording and move the character back and forth in real time.

Muvizu does all this already and more with 3d characters, but to have the muvizu approach of "don't animate, direct instead" applied to a 2d animation software package but maintaining the keyframe options and abilities to create your own individually created "actors", backgrounds etc and just layer them on to the preset animation skeletons would be incredible.
Until that day comes I think I'll be spending most of my time With Muvizu and doing just that in 3D.

Cheers
D