Making Bill Talk!
With iClone, making our characters talk is fantastically easy. You can either speak directly into a microphone and see your character’s mouth move with your voice or do as I perfer to, which is to record a sound clip and then get your charater to talk to that.
I asked my friend, the American Bill (not Smuggler Bill) to record this:-
I am Smuggler Bill,
I am 6 feet high,
I have a curling lock,
I have a roving eye.
Of course he sent it as a .wma file. iClone only accepts .wav or .mp3 – so I converted it.
So here is Bill, hardly recovered from having his face fattened, having his recording applied to his face:-
Notice that under Facial Animation, in the Modify panel on the right there is an option to record or open a file. I opened the file that Bill had recorded and I had converted to .wav and low and behold, Bill started talking. I added a background image of some sky to make the clip slightly more interesting.
Click on the image above to see and hear Bill talk
Clicking on the image of Bill above should take you to a YouTube video of Bill saying what I asked him to say. Hopefully it will open in another window so that you don’t lose your place here.
Clearly we need to animate his body a bit so he doesn’t look quite so dead from the neck down. However the purpose of this was to make sure that anyone who speaks in the movie can be easily made to do so. I like the fact that I don’t have to provide iClone with any information other than the recorded speech clip to get the mouth to move in sync with what he says. Of course iClone also contains options to animate the face further.
Tony