How to Smooth Out Poser Talking Characters

Poser is 3-D figure design and animation software. With it, animators teach their digital characters to speak with Poser Talk Designer.

Instructions

1. Find good aspiring voice actors. Record the audio file at a high sampling rate. Talk Designer will run smoother with a higher-quality file. It supports WAV (PC) and AIFF (Mac) formats. Write the dialog from the audio file and save it in TXT format.

2. Add a character to the Pose Room and change to the Face Camera. Adjust the camera until the character fills the scene. Design a custom face in the Face Room. Select "Spawn Morph Target," return to the Pose Room and dial Head Morph to 1.000.

3. Select "Talk Designer" from the Window menu and load the sound file. Its length determines Talk Designer's end frame. Import the supplemental text file. Animators adding this file receive better results with Talk Designer.

4. Choose the "Viseme Map File" that matches your character. This file matches phoneme information with facial expressions. For scenes with more than one character, select the figure who is speaking.

5. Activate the Animation Controls. Match the animation's end frame with Talk Designer's end frame.

6. Adjust the enunciation slide bar. The character will overemphasize his words by increasing this value. Talk Designer also includes eye blink rate and emotion slide bars. Adjust these values to match the sound file.

7. Review the sound animation. The Animation Controls resemble a DVD player. Select "Graph" from the Windows menu and play the animation again. The graph displays the speech pattern. Pause the playback, then click and drag the character's mouth to match the speech.