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Sounds like big time progress. Yes, I'm reluctant to use lip syncing, not only for the animation time, but also because I try to avoid dialogue altogether. "Show, don't tell" is the motto, like Kubrick who was known for taking a script and lining out a lot of dialogue, saying the actor could convey the message with gestures, body language, etc. "2001: A Spce Odyssey" has no dialogue in the first 25 and last 23 minutes, and 88 total minutes with no dialogue. The animation "The Tripletts of Belleville" (2003) has almost no dialogue: "There’s so much to take in visually and musically that the lack of dialogue makes perfect sense. Mere words would just get overwhelmed in Belleville’s symphony of bizarre, stirring imagery ... " (The AV Club, 6May2020)
And yes, I get about the same low secs per froam with the AMD 12 core/24 thread CPU. Did you really mean 12 frames per second for lip sync?
despite having almost 100 SAPI5 TTS voices installed on Windows 10 and all of them accessible in Balabolka and iClone6 I have almost completely stopped using dialogue in my videos.
when I do use dialogue I often just use my own voice modified with Audacity filters or Screaming Bee Morphvox (on my Win7 but I send files over my wifi network)
I think watching too many Reddit narration videos put me off robotic voices
I just watched "You Were Never Really Here" on Amazon Prime (6.8 IMDB, 4 Stars out of 4 at rogerebert.com) Directed by Lynne Ramsay, whose movies are described: "They are low on dialogue and explicit story exposition, and instead use images, vivid details, music and sound design to create their worlds."
It worked for me, although my wife got a little confused - of course she plays games on her Ipad while watching ...
@Steve K Yes 12 fps for lip sync. However I should qualify this - it's a minimum spec for rapid development. For the finished article still 24 fps is the mimium for me. re: A space Odyssey, very true. Even the talkie section is sparce in places as you mention. Leonard Rossiter was one of my fav actors back then.
@WendyLuvsCatz Wow. I looked for additional voices over those on the Microsoft site. They were not cheap. The Scottish lady one was pretty convincing. I'll look into Screaming Bee (I still have a windowss 7 machine which sits there for special occaisions) cheers.
Another time saving. Using PNG with no background is a lot less trouble than Green screening. What a luxury we have over real film.
A money saver (but NOT a time saver). Using acting performances from video and picking out parts of words to form new words in Sony Vegas. The trick is to only show the head in the frame, and to make sure each section lines up to be the same size head and as close as you can to the previous position. That can then be captured by facemotion3d. I can rescue a bad acting performance or add additional words this way. However I'm yet to test capturing via a half speed playback to avoid "skips" in the capture when the actors head positions dont line up.
Screaming bee might work on 10 but I haven't installed it there
these are all the free Microsoft voices I have, it. 90+ of them, I had to use a registry hack to access them though
you can without but then need to put your PC into that language
plenty of YouTube tutorials on it and I have an exe
see this thread
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/475426/text-to-speech-software-for-animations
@WendyLuvsCatz Thanks very much for the info. I saw the extra languages, but didn't see much point in getting them. (Although I have played with foriegn languages with english words to get accents before - so some use). I am checking out that thread though. More info!
By the way have you ever used Murf.ai? They are the best voices I've come across. It's a paid service but you can subscribe for a month and cancel at the end of it.
I am on a miserly budget, people on the pension or the dole get more than I do
but it is my money at least so I don't have to work
Early retirement Superannuation but not very much
Sorry to hear that but it is the life of an artist for most of us. I'm selling stuff on ebay a lot. Pays for the 3d.
The bright side is you are living the 3d dream - constantly working at it. My prediction is that in the not too distant future it will be "normal" for individuals to produce 3d films / shorts. The big breakthrough will be intelligent 3d people, with built in reactions to commands you give them. I'm not an animation purist - just want to get the films made.
I reckon you'll enjoy faster development as well.
Here is a detailed analysis of the movie "You Were Never Really Here", 24 minutes. Pretty interesting, unsettling stuff from the director and lead actor. And very little dialogue.
It shows it can be done. Of course we started with silent movies and captions anyway. It is a skill to tell the story this way for sure.
I hope you don't mind me talking about lip sync. It's just I'm looking at all areas of making animated movies ASAP, and lip sync is a problem.
On a side note I read last night that use of eyes, head movements and facial expressions convey half of what any words would hope to achieve anyway, so that is another area to look at (to avoid talking). There are voice overs too, but they can sound corny if you are not careful.
Body movement conveys words as well. However if that means not using stock animation footage (for editing), but making it yourself that would be expensive (time wise). I may have mentioned this before, but I intend to use https://www.deepmotion.com/ for mocap to G2 in these cases. I would then render simple scenes in Daz, and continue to render larger scenes in Carrara (via Octane).
There is also "mocap mojo" for retartgetting mixamo animations to G3 and G8. I believe we have an almost ok G3 working in Carrara thanks to efforts elsewhere on these forums, so in theorry then that could be converted to aniblocks and imported into carrara.
Not at all. I still intend to use it when it fits. Some of my favorite movie memories are dialogue lines. A 48 Hour entry years ago in the Superhero genre was titled "The Opossum" (I think), and one character said after the hero had just used his "power":
"I'm thinkin' he ain't dead. How many times you all gonna fall for this?"
Ok great. On a different note - have you ever considered trying to construct a short using 360 degree clips with animated characters layered over the top?
e.g. https://www.storyblocks.com/video/search?media-type=footage&categories=360-files
It would also work with any video clips, but with the 360 clips your figure can walk down a street etc by panning the clip in time with the walk.
easy for us with Octane
not so easy Carrara render, been there tried that, lots of spot renders
Wendy - Will Octane take an mp4 or the like as a background image then? I was only thinking of compositiing it in Sony Vegas, but that would be a step up for sure.
Now if you can tell me that I can use a moving hdri file somehow, Carrara or Daz, I'll be very happy.
image series work but I often find putting them in the backdrop a bit flaky
Ok good news - thanks - I can live with a bit of bother now and again. So I might light the larger scenes in Carrara (Octane) with a moving backround and a foreground light set.
backgrounds are easier to use than backdrops and will affect the lighting but they need to be spherical renders obviously
I flesh out HDRis with trees and stuff and moving clouds
Moving clouds - good idea.
No, I haven't, but it looks interesting, if a little complicated. I have not had a lot of luck with HDRI's, but at a simpler level, I do like the "spherical" backgrounds like the space spheres. One example, (starts ~0:35):
Ah yes. It worked well. Also I loved the light on the snowmen. That looked just right. I also liked the theme - kids and Christmas. Great stuff.
p.s. still fighting for faster render times. I got a render of a single G2 with an hdri background and some foreground lights down to 5 secs a frame tonight. G8 record is 7 secs for one and 14 secs for 2. 16 secs with dof added. Any more content after that it needs additional work or my Graphic cards 8gb limit is breached and the denoiser stops working. Of course these are daz times and Carrara with octane will be faster. I'm caught between daz and Carrara for most scenes right now.
Thanks. The story was based on some "Calvin & Hobbes" strips, one of my favorite sources of inspiration.
Yes, thanks again. Those animations seem to get more views, especially this time of year. Here are a few more oldies, just 1 to 3 minutes:
I don't have much to offer, I don't use DAZ Studio or G2/G8, just (non-Octane) Carrara with Gen4 figures. I don't recall any memory breaches ... but I generally get around 5 sec/frame on the AMD 12 core machine, and that's good enough for the 5 minute contest videos in two days. If I'm doing the math right, that's 10 hours render time IF the whole 5 minute video is animated. But using stills cuts that down ... and BTW stills, e.g. VUE landscapes, done before the contest are allowed. And I have other slower but still quick computers to allow other work (title cards, video FX, scene setups, music, sound FX) while the animation renders ...
@Steve K Three good watches. The first one was a particle-fest! I enjoyed seeing the Victorian Street and what you did with it. I plan to use The Counting house myself. It's too good to pass up on. Also some nice scenery scenes throughout all of them.
re Timings, well if you are getting around 5 sec a frame then that's probably as good as it gets. I know in theory Carrara's native render can blast them out at 1 sec per frame, but there wouldn't be much in the scene in that case! The backup computers are essential as well. I have 2 here, but only 1 has a graphic card at the moment.
I worked with V3-V4, M3-M4 for 11 years until a year ago, until I went full into Genesis. Carrara will render G2s though right? This is useful for speed. They are still relatively memory light, and can be used for custom video gnerated mocaps via deepmotion (the website).
The 8th of December is my 3d anniversary, so I'm now in my 12th year. If memory recalls you and I started approx the same time. We've seen a lot of changes in that decade and a bit eh?
Thanks. For whatever reawson, "Space Cadet Luther" gets more views than anything. Even my wife liked it, and she's a tough audience (who likes dialogue).
Indeed. I recall an early "Multimedia" program (can't remember the name) that allowed simple music (MIDI?) and a little motion. I was impressed, my wife not so much. Really not at all, same as the boss of a charity that I volunteered at. "My husband gets all excited about a little flag waving ..." But it was sort of like the first discovery of the transistor at Bell Labs (1947 - you can find the lab page online). It led to bigger things.
He he. Wives eh? I'm fortunate in that I found my wife a couple of years into making my epic web series what went on for years. So she was into it (that enthusiasm understanably wained in the first year of marriage a few years later). I'm glad to say she's back into it now as I gear up to present this thing as a feature film.
Before that in April 2010, I went and put my heart and soul into my first serious 5 min animation. It took a month and I did little else all month, learning on the job. I had a girlfriend at the time who didn't express herself much. So I played the original sci fi funk pilot episode to her, and she watched in silence.
Afterwards I said "well, what do you think?". "Nice" was her reply. "Nice?! That's one month of my life, reduced to a single word!". "Oh ok, well why do they move so slowly?". I realised it was time to back off. We split up a month later. (Not over the animation, but it makes for a good ending to the story - ha ha).
Yes, audience feedback is a two edged sword. Before Covid, the 48 Hour Premiere screenings were at a theater. It's a litle nerve wracking waiting for any audience reactions. I recall once when my video took a very downward turn, a young woman nearby moaned "Awww ... ". Another time most of the audience started laughing at one point in my video, a white board in the background had a small list of checked off items: "Character, Prop, Dialogue" (the required elements - a large portion of the audience are team members). Nobody is ever rude, but its nice to get positive reactions. I really enjoyed the movie "Shakespeare In Love", with scenes like the end of the premiere performance of "Romeo and Juliette". The cast backs up to stage rear, the curtain drops, and they all look wide-eyed at each other with the audience dead quiet. After what seems like an eternity, the audience breaks into loud applause (and tears?). A great scene.