Talk Designer

The Talk Designer is new to Poser 7. I was very interested to see how well this worked as I had used the lip sync tool in Animation Master by Hash. previously.

Talk designer

I'm sad to say the Talk Designer while being very easy to use doesn't produce very convincing results. Essentially all you're getting is the mouth opening and closing in time with the sound file. You load in a sound file of some speech and you can also load in or type in the spoken words and this helps but there's no easy way to synch the text to the sound file. You can manually adjust the phonemes and timing in the timeline but this is terribly tedious. Animation Master on the other hand produces much better results as you get much more control over the words and their phonemes and you can visually and with sound, adjust the mouth movements to match the audio file. I think the developers of Poser need to go back to the drawing board and start again.

Here's a little test animation to give you an idea of the result. This is with no timeline tweaking. I couldn't be bothered spending 1-2 hours trying to improve it.

However to Poser 7's credit you can have automatic eye blinking and head movement to add a bit of realism. One other problem with the Talk Designer is that when you apply the speech to your character and play back the animation the speech doesn't seem to be synched to match the animation playback speed. e.g. forcing Poser to playback every frame has no effect on the playback speed of the audio. The only way to really check things is to render out the animation.