Putting a face to the female voice

[aubergine]

Anyone with the English language version of the game will be familiar with the female voice that does the mission briefings in the campaign and "unit under attack" type announcements in the rest of the game.

I've been wondering what she'd look like and whether it's worth trying to do some 3D animations with her.

As an experiment, I used a free copy of Daz 3D Studio 4 to create a character and apply some basic lip sync:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CVeggGeuEI

It's my first ever attempt at a 3D animation so please excuse all the mistakes!

Is it worth pursuing this idea and seeing if we can have her feature in more cutscenes and cinematics?

[Rman Virgil]

.

Nice job.

Good idea.

Is that the exit from NORAD I'm seeing? "Scav Wars" cut-scene, perhaps?

.

[iap]

Oh man, you are unbelievable!

But I don't think a narrator like this will fit in the game... In my opinion it might even be a synthesized voice.
Like this: http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php

[Searge-Major]

It's good, well done.

I had an idea a few weeks back when I was playing the campaign. I was watching the cut-scenes for no reason whatsoever, and I suddenly thought it would be a great idea to redo them in HD, in blender or something, maybe even embellishing them. As it was such a huge amount of work, I didn't post, but IMO the game would greatly benefit from it.

Just thought I'd post now, the two are kind of related.

[aubergine]

@Rman: Yes, it was an attempt at creating the exit tunnel but I need to learn how to properly light 3D scenes. I've found that I can export movies with transparent regions, which means I can show videos of in-game footage in the background which opens up some interesting possibilities.

@iap: There's usually a lot of licensing issues around TTS systems that might make it difficult to use them in-game. Generally speaking, commercially licensed things aren't compatible with the GPL license that Warzone uses.

@Searge: Yup, that's why I've been dabbling with all sorts of video stuff recently. I believe there are some other projects underway to create new FMVs (full motion videos) using something called Macinima (I've no idea what that is but based on stuff I've seen in WZ forums it somehow hooks in to the WZ game engine to get data about 3D scenes and then make movies from it?)

[Rman Virgil]

.

The grandaddy of all things Machinima, where it all started in 2002:

http://www.machinima.org/machinima-faq.html

And where it's at today - humungous:

http://www.machinima.com/

.

[iap]

First of all: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

I wasn't talking about USING Text to speech, I was raising a general idea about the source of the voice

If you want to add more text, I might be able to arrange something flesh and blood

[aubergine]

@Rman: Well, I'm having lots of problems with Daz3D -- despite being commercial software, it feels like the early stages of a badly managed open source project with every aspect of it being confusing, incredibly slow and often broken.

Could Machinima be used to do cutscenes and possibly character animation? It's the character animation that seems to be the biggest obstacle at the moment.

@iap: I looked at espeak, and a number of other TTS systems and found their output to be of low quality. The link you posted earlier to the oddcast site is one of the best TTS I've seen. I made a quick demo using some sound generated on the oddcast site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVAtgKqPh3o

(Please excuse the issue with clothing around her chesticles, Daz3D has lots of failings)

[Rman Virgil]

.

@aubergine: Machinima can be used for character animations.... just not with WZ. 3 basic reasons. The scale and quality of our assets for such: Baba & Borgs. Also our camera scheme - Drive Mode (aka, the "War Cam") gives the right scale but the controls are non-existent. Theoretically if those 3 hurdles could be overcome then you would be able to do character animations in WZ - all exteriors, of course. You could work around the lip synching by tight shots on those listening while those speaking are voice-overs with them not blocked into the shot or done with their back facing away from the camera.

*Or do the whole thing voice-over, documentary style.....or you might consider how the old C & C cut scenes were done with live actors... then doing some post production FX processing to that footage before editing into your Machinima footage.*

However.... there are any number of games with the engine, scale, quality assets and scripting to do it.

Predominantly Machinima are done with FPS engines / Assets... but there are exceptions... like the ones done with "Never Winter Nights", for example.

An other consideration is the licensing - it's gotta be compatible with WZ.

Also, theoretically, if licensing is not an issue then you could do character Machinima animations in an other game and post production edit it in a dedicated movie-making app into your WZ Machinima footage. Hope that helps some.

There are good animation progs out there...(you can do good character animations in Blender though you need to be a good 3D artist)....

There are some Indie (& some free) super friendly FPS game creation suites that include quality character assets whose licence might be compatible.

Most of these game creation suites are on windows but I know your Mac so I did a quick look see and found this one (based on the Cube 2 engine) that's OSS and also has a focus on making FPS Machinima as the default mode. From what I can tell you'll have to compile the latest Mac Binary..... there are earlier versions with already compiled Mac. exes.

http://www.sandboxgamemaker.com/

You may find some others.... this was a really quick search.

.

[Rman Virgil]

.

More stuff for making Machinima on the Mac...

http://gridjumper.net/machinima/


And I totally forget to mention that Second Life is a terrific platform for character Machinima:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Machinima

.

[Rman Virgil]

.

Ja, whatcha think...?

Know it's a load to mull-over.

~ RV
.