[Addon] Quick Talk, lip synching tool - UPDATED 22 Oct 2015

I got fed up with Papagayo crashing on me all the time and not handling multiple voices the way I wanted so I write a blender Addon to do something similar.

Feed it a mesh with shape-keys and it’ll build a rig for a control panel controlling those shape keys.

Feed it a simple textfile with a script for the dialogue and it’ll plot markers for each dialogue, line and word in the scene.

Move those markers to where the words actually start and it’ll set keyframes to animate the rig to manipulate the shape-keys to make the lips move along with the script.

Hope someone finds it as useful as I’m expecting to find it. There’s a video-tutorial and link to it’s github home on it’s homepage here:

UPDATED - VERSION 1.1

Updated version now allows you to work with characters imported from Makehuman too.

Here’s how:

2 Likes

thats a really cool plugin! you Totally could sell it on blender market!

Heh, thanks, but it only took a weekend once I finally got around to actually figuring out how I wanted it to work. GPL makes more sense anyway, giving back since the Blender folks gave me so much.

Very nice work! Animators will be very very happy. Thnx.

Is it possible version like this?
Not bone rotation but bone x-transformation from left to right.


Woow !!! Brillant !!!
Thanks a lot for the addon and the nice spirit ! :yes:

Okay, yeah, good plan.

Have updated the script to include a menu to select if you want to build/plot bones X-Translation or X-Rotation.

Also fixed a bug where the rotation was fixed to WORLD rather than LOCAL coordinates.

Thank you very much, pre, excellent job!

Very Impressive!

Excellent !! Thanks a lot or sharing this useful addon, seems very easy to use.

Cool add-on. Never had any success with papawhatever, probably my fault get very impatient if it takes to long to figure out. Ha. Gonna give this a shot when I get home. Thanks

So basically, you just made a FaceRig… Thank you, I have been looking for something like this. Although I do Agree with krokodil, it would be cool to have a slidebar. But I am happy with this!

Thank you again!

Glad you think it’ll be useful, and I too agreed with Krokodil that sliders ought to be an option at least so the latest version of that plugin does indeed contain a drop-menu to select between rotation and translation as the basis for the shape-key controlling bones. :slight_smile:

Well. I will keep my eyes open if you update! I will start using this, this summer, and frankly, I cant wait!

Do you mind some constructive criticism. I thought I had better ask first. Some developers/programmer get irate when you even suggest that they did something that might not be perfect.

Not at all. I’ve been programming for nearly 30 years, I’m well aware all code has bugs, even mine. Actually especially mine since I rarely get bug reports on other’s code. You get used to trying to put ego aside. I know you can criticise my code without it being a criticism of me personally.

Having said that, it works for my purposes so I may not have time to do anything actually complicated or difficult to improve it :wink:

pre: Have you thought about trying your plugin with with a Makehuman character. Makehuman is a program in which you can create a rigged human character and save it out into a format (.mhx) that can be imported into blender. IF you use the newer .mhx2 format you can tell the importer to create facial expression, a facial righ and vismeme shape keys automatically. I know that visemes are different from phoneme. From what I read on wikipedia visemes are much more basic units of speech. That is phonemes are composed of visemes. But with the automatic creation that .mhx2 offers and your addon it would seem like a perfect fit.

I have used makehuman, though the latest version I used is at least a year old now and probably older than two. IIRC it looked like the visemes were still in development in that last version I used.

If it creates shape-keys with the standard viseme set then simply naming those keys appropriately should enable creation of the control-panel and building of the animation curves from the script to adjust it.

If it adds a more complicated face-control system then presumably you can shape the face with that and then create shape-keys from the mix I guess.

Might look into it next time I have to build a human shaped thing.

Ok I do not now enough about the technical and programming side of thing of either blender,makehuman or mhx2 so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

About a year ago the import format for makehuman to blender (mhx) split off into its own project. ThomasL the developer of the mhx format started his own blog and developed a new format called mhx2 that has a lot more features. The old mhx export is still distributed with the official makehuman distro but ThomasL offers the mhx zip at his blog and on github for free.

So you would probably want to ingore the official distro of makehuman at www.makehuman.org and get the dev version at

https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman
I use tortisehg to get it and update it. Do not ask me all the ins and outs. As I said I am not that much of a technical person. I just know how to download it,install it and update it when there is a feature that I want to use.

Second you need to get the mhx2 zip from ThomasL’s website/repostory

That page has the dowload link and documentations and instructions.

Third If I may toot my own horn I made a min tutorial on how to enable visemes for a makehuman character

http://forum.makehuman.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11936#p29163

Ah, thanks for the tips. Was certainly not doing any mhx2 stuff I don’t think so that’ll help come next time :slight_smile:

This is probably a stupid question, but I’m relatively new to blender. Will it work with rigify?

I like the idea with the plugin a lot, I’m sure that I’m going to use it excessively in the future.