Using Mimic to Make Poser Characters Talk

Series Summary

The computer rendering program Poser is popular with fine art and commercial artists, who use it to create realistic human and animal figures for everything from product packaging to magazine covers. The program is set up as a virtual studio with lights, backgrounds, props, and wardrobes. Although it is compatible with a number of other 3D animation programs, Poser has limited animation capabilities of its own. Users choose from a basic library of human, animal and robotic figures to build their files, as the program cannot model figures from scratch. Poser also includes a variety of stock poses, textures, hair pieces and facial expressions to be used with the figure. Many third party merchants sell similar content which expands the possibilities of Poser-created figures.

In this free series of computer animation lessons, you will learn how to make your Poser figures talk using the program's Mimic feature. This powerful option allows you to sync up the lips of your characters with the voices you record to create an animated character that looks like it is actually speaking the words coming out of its mouth. Our expert John Carstarphen demonstrates how to use Mimic to analyze sound and phoneme strength, then use the lip sync, keyframe and interpolation features to create an accurate approximation of a talking head. You will learn will also learn to create talking characters using Poser's Talk Designer feature.

Video Transcript

"JOHN CARSTARPHEN: Hi. This is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. In this exercise, we're going to make our Poser characters talk and we're going to do that using three different methods. We're going to use a standalone program, the separate program from Poser called Mimic, and we're using version 3 of Mimic, the latest version, which allows you to automatically add the lip shapes and the talking to a Poser character. It's designed for rigged Poser characters. And the second method we're going to use is the in-Poser talking program called the Talk Designer, and that is like Mimic but it's designed for use within the Poser program. And then the last method, we'll look at are phonemes and visemes and just using manual key frames to create speech in Poser. So let's start with Mimic. This is the default opening window for Mimic. We're going to take one of the standard DAZ sounds and we'll just open the folder. We'll take this one, "Thanks Mimic," and play it. COMPUTER VOICEOVER: Thanks Mimic. Now I can really express myself."