I will adopt this convention for the rest of the tutorial, so for example the "B" phoneme will now land on frame 1141 instead of frame 141. The reason why I do this is because I like to reserve frames 1-999 for viewing and modelling my RVK's - if you look at my file you'll find that on frame 1 you'll see the base mesh, frame 11 you'll see Key 1, frame 21 you'll see key 2, etc. I actually like to do one variation to this technique: I like to start my animation on frame 1001, so when I paste the text output in notepad I add one thousand to all of the frame numbers.
We do this using the following steps: A) Press the copy to clipboard button B) Launch notepad and select the menu "Edit->Paste" C) Save the file as Magpie.txt D) Open your model in blender and bring up a text window (shift-F11) and select "Open New" from the Menu and locate the file Magpie.txt from the file browser. No thanks! Blender has a built in text editor so wouldn't it be nice to have the magpie data as text right inside our file? (the answer is yes!) We could save it in the magpie format (an MPS file) and then alternate between the magpie window and the blender window as we construct our IPO's. Having mapped out our sound clip, our next task is to use this info to construct some mesh IPO's for our relative vertex keys. Here is a copy of my Magpie file for this sound clip: It is highly recommended that you also go through the "Getting Started" section of the help file that comes with Magpie. If you have time, map out the rest of the words in the clip. If you don't get these values, don't fret: there is no one true method for mapping out the phonemes! The frames that I get for the phonemes are as follows: "B" on frame 141 "L" on frame 143 "E" on frame 144 "N" on frame 146 "D" on frame 147 "U" on frame 148 (the "E" sounds like a "U") and "R" on frame 150. Pay attention to the animated cartoon mouth - if something doesn't look quite right try moving a phoneme around by a frame or two.
Double click the "B" on the side bar to assign a B phoneme to frame 141.Ĭontinue this exercise with the rest of the phonemes in this word. I hear "Blender"! This tells me that I will give this frame the "B" phoneme. This tells me that the "B" phoneme is earlier than this frame. This plays frame 142 and all frames after it in our zoomed sound clip. O.K., lets find the first phoneme (this should "B" fun!) The important tool in this part of the exercise is the "Play From Selection" button (the "Play" button which is preceded by a red verticle bar). cooking show chef I will say "Here's one I prepared earlier": My model has an IKA skeleton on layer 3 with control empties on layer 2. It would also be useful to have an IKA skeleton for your model - certainly a neck and a skull would greatly increase the possibilities for your character. You should also create several other keys which model other facial movements and expressions - my model has 16 additional RVK's that control his eyes, eye brows, moustache and hair. An excellent introduction to using phonemes in computer animation can be found on this page.
The model I use has 11 such keys, but it is possible to do decent animations with less. The mesh of the model should have several relative vertex keys built in that represent the basic phonemes of speech. The first job (which is beyond the scope of this tutorial) is to create a model. Relative Vertex Keys are needed for speech and facial expressions