Requesting Your Help With Lip Sync
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Posts: 866
Hi All,
I've read all I can find and tried all I know how. I'm doing something fundamentally wrong but I don't know what it is. I found, opened and configured DAZ Lip Sync. It seemed easy enough, but my results are dismal. I know DAZ can do better than this because I've seen it. With a little help from you, I hope to find out how it was done.
My Poor Results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQS9AnBNtoA
My Inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpGExCqMeuo
DAZ Lip Sync Documentation: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/lipsync/start
My Lip Sync Dialog Panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pMMi6Kqfj4
All comments are welcome. :-)
Thanks.
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Comments
Is that Genesis 2 Male in your video?
Yes it is.
FWIW, I'm getting similar results using Mimic Pro. DAZ performs other animation tasks well and easily.
If you select the figure in DS and in Parameters look at Pose Controls>Head>Visemes do you have entries from AA to W?
Yes, I have a full set of visemes in Parameters. None are locked or hidden.
Lip sync frames are recorded in the timeline. But when they play back, the video is very sluggish. It seems both late and underemphasized. If I could get the results I saw in the 2009 YT video, I would be overjoyed.
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OK. I brought a G2M into Carerra, and I did a Mimic lip sync using the same audio file and the same DMC file I used in DAZ. It lip synced nicely. Then I exported it as an FBX and brought it into DAZ. The lip sync degraded, displaying the same symptoms as when it was created in DAZ to begin with.
Well, I've slept on this. I'm going to make an educated guess (not because I'm so educated, but because it's all I have :-) ). My guess is, this has something to do with my install, which is somewhat peculiar. I am going to guess that Lip Sync is looking for a file that it can't find. I know Lip Sync worked in the past (before I moved the DAZ install location) because I made a test clip.
I'm going to uninstall DAZ, purge the system as best I can, uninstall DIM (whose default install paths I have altered), then reinstall everything, this time accepting all the DAZ defaults (even though it means installing a new, bigger hard drive). This is going to take a while, but the results should be worth it. Wish me luck.
Richard, if there are any particular words of caution you can offer, or any comments at all, I welcome them.
are you using the same dmc configuration file in both animations?
that is what assigns the visemes and some appear missing in your first animation.
there is a genesis 2 one in the my library/general subfolder if you installed starter essentials.
you can also make your own using the default dmc in notepad if not using Mimic pro (which is no longer available anyway) I do this a lot for some Poser figures that crash Mimic pro.
You just add the morphs found on that figure's head that match the visemes.
just in case you do not have this information.
Richard told me once:
" You need the 64 bit version for iray (and the ability to handle more than the simplest scenes), but LipSync is 32 bit only so if you use that you need the 32 bit version to set the speech up (you can then add to the scene and render in the 64 bit version). "
The DMC file I am using (Genesis2.dmc) is dated last mod JAN2014. As I recall, it is the same one that Carerra used in my recent experiment, since I had to supply the path. In is in a dir called DAZ\Content\General\Mimic Configs. I have never modified it (although I recently peered inside it for the first time). It is not the same DMC file I used in my successful test of a few years ago. That test used an M4 figure.
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Damn...I just figured out what was wrong. If you could have seen my timeline, you would have seen it instantly. Are you sitting down? I had the FPS set on 1! Setting it to 30 cured all ills. After that, I put on my dunce hat and paced around the house muttering.
Thanks for listening. Just being asked a couple of questions was enough to make me look harder. :-)
I once accidently rendered a video at 1FPS and wondered why it was so jerky
That's what I'm talkin' about!
That makes sense. Thanks!
I'd meant to ask about your FPS setting in one of my earlier posts, sorry.
As I said above, if you had seen my timeline, you would have spotted it right away. I didn't know what to make of it. I had all these keyframes in between frames, but I couldn't advance the cursor to them! All is well now, thanks.
I'm b a a a c k.
I have two characters in the same scene, and I want them to have a dialog. I have a seperate sound file for each character. When I analyze the second sound file, the first sound track disappears, even though I am able to retain the viseme morphs that went with it. I'm going to make two guesses, and I ask you to tell me if I'm right or wrong.
1.) I can't find the audio file itself either on Timeline or Keymate. I am guessing it isn't shown.
2.) I am guessing that DAZ will only accept one audio file, and that the two characters will need to be combined into a single audio track.
I could be wrong about either of these.
Thanks.
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I've spent the day examining my guesses (above). Having no lipsync on the timeline is a bit of a problem, isn't it. It makes it pretty hard to adjust the start time of the lipsync. It also looks like putting voice tracks for two different characters in a single file is a fail. As soon as I deselected the first character and selected the second one, the first character lost the voice track.
Am I missing something big? Or is the best strategy stitching together mini-clips in a video editor? I've seen people mentioning this approach. Sorry if I sound too dumb for this forum, I don't know how to learn without asking.
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There is a thing I haven't tried. I haven't tried merging two scenes, each with a lipsync character.
I think it depends on your hardware as well as DAZ studio.
It used to support only one wav unlike Carrara for example on my laptop but on my desktop with a soundblaster card I can get at least 2 working, its also possibly a 32 bit limitation.
carefully noting frames where lipsync added is advised and render to image series then composite, thats what I do even in Carrara.
That's encouraging. My hardware is decent, but even if it falls short, hardware is something I can and would change. It is important to me that two characters be able to have a dialog. I will test this shortly with two simple sound files and two basic characters. I will try to save the characters as subsets. I'll get back with my results.
My machine has an older I5 quad (only one thread per core) with 32G, an Nvidia K2000 and an external Soundblaster X-Fi. It has been adequate so far, but sooner or later that will not be true.
I've always rendered to an AVI, I've never rendered to an image series. What's the gain? Speed? Animation quality? Less resource intensive? Or do you do it because it's easy to line up the audio tracks with the lipsyncs?
Thanks.
all the above
and if it crashes or the avi cannot be saved or saves corrupt you do not lose your work.
a frequent problem with D|S in the past for me at least.
Must admit been fairly stable in the 4.9 builds.
I've not crashed the machine yet, although rendering even a single image maxes out the CPU, making the machine useless for any other task. I have also had DAZ 32 (4.9) just close down when the going gets rough. I'm sure it's hardware related but I don't know exactly what to do about it. I suspect it's about threads. The I7 8-core ($$$) has 32 threads. :-) [lust]
I do have a copy of Vegas. I'll try that out this week too. If this is what I need to use, I will use it. It is good to have it as a fallback strategy.
Thanks.
not my computer but D|S has frequently liked to crash and show me my desktop saving the avi after rendering done
you can grab the image files out of a folder in application data roaming before saving if lucky
My Adventures in Rendering are yet to come. If I find that I need to use a video editor to assemble audio and video, they will come sooner rather than later.
yeah rendering in D|S on my quad core with 16GB RAM rather a lengthy process to risk losing the lot.
I prefer Carrara as its engine faster than 3Delight, only used D|S once again getting a 980ti and Octane and occasionally iray.
Rendering looks like a rabbit hole to me. All I want is shadows, and as much speed as I can afford. I have not been able to find a list of preferred hardware requirements for 3Delight, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, 3Delight is oblivious to the GPU.
yes is CPU based only iray can use CPU and or GPU but reverts to CPU very quickly if the scene too big textures too large, Octane costs a lot but you get a lot more control for that, in Carrara Octane plugin I can make textures out of core using CPU and D|S can reduce sizes.
your best bet is iray with backgrounds rendered separately and a a 980ti or Titan z.
There is a spherical camera in the beta now so can do 360 iray dome renders too for bacgrounds.
Iray does a gorgeous job, it can't be denied. And the 980ti is a real nice gadget all right. I read some speculation that its price may drop in 1Q17, when the 1080ti is released. I have not ruled out Iray. 3Delight on the other hand is fast, and available to me immediately. I have even considered rendering video in OpenGL, just to get something out. I just can't wait for everything to be perfect anymore.
1 minute of video = 60 seconds = 1800 frames @ 1 min. per frame = 30 hours. Egad... I would need a second machine running 24/7 to do this. I don't really have my arms around this yet.
A joke comes to mind. The young boy brings his car to the old engine builder and says enthusiastically, "I want you to build me an engine that goes really fast!" The old man says "Speed costs money, son. How fast do you want to go?" :-)