This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Of course, now that "Tim" is prepped, future animations using his character will take a lot less time. Cook) it would not take too much refinement to get them looking really sharp. The whole process - including defining the animation "bones" and grabbing the audio from the earnings call podcast feed - took less than 15 minutes for this clip, and even though the results are kind of rough (sorry about the hair, Mr. In the example here, I've taken Tim Cook and put some of his comments from the recent earnings call in his virtual mouth. The results range from decidedly comical to eerily realistic. You can tweak emotions, attitudes or the overall character energy with a few clicks. Import or record your dialogue audio (or use the built-in text to speech feature) and the Auto Motion animation tools will analyze sounds and phonemes, trying to match mouth and face motions to the soundtrack. Once the base character "puppet" is ready, Crazy Talk really gets to work. The idea is to make a model of the character's face that will react appropriately to the audio using Crazy Talk's Auto Motion feature. You can also pull in your own images for the face animation treatment political or corporate portraits seem to work particularly well, as do pet snapshots.įor the DIY images, the app walks you through preparing them with essential feature points - corners of the eyes, point of the chin and so forth. For a modest cost, this app delivers impressive character animation power - with a learning curve that's not too steep for amateurs.Ĭrazy Talk lets you work with libraries of preconfigured characters, where mouth movements and other motions are already pinned to specific features on the character's image.
That's why the Mac version of Reallusion's US$29.99 Crazy Talk 7 Standard is such an intriguing product.
If your work or play involves facial animation, however, you know how much work goes into making fake speech look convincingly real.Īlthough there are impressive pro animation tools for this task, they might run you hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. Putting words in other people's mouths: more of a hobby than a vocation for most people, I'd say.