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| Realtime talking character animation tool. Generates lip synchonization using the Amiga's narrator device, and your own IFF images, animbrushes and sounds. |
| The relationship between the narrator's voice and animated mouth movements has previously not been explored enough to reveal the full creative possibilities. The program concept grew from a desire to create an animated mouth using the the Amiga's narrator.device. The explorations of how to assemble and syncronize the graphic and sound elements led to the creation of animouth. The multitasking capabilities of the Amiga as well as it's ability to move images around quickly in memory, allows realistic character speech in realtime, even with limited resources. |
| The Amiga's narrator.device, while generating synthesized speech, also outputs messages which an application can interpret as mouth width and height. animouth exploits this approach in displaying vowel sounds, while improving on the design by inserting exceptions for consonants to give a more realistic look. Up to 64 different images can be used to display each animated mouth, mapped to 270 possible events that can be generated. Although default mapping is provided, animouth's JawMap editor allows for individual interpretation of the narrator.device's output. Optionally, sounds can be imported to be triggered in sync with the mouth movement. Volume level is adjustable, so the sound can be simultaneous with or can replace the narrator voice. This allows you to animate any voice you can digitize. |
| A complete implementation of all the narrator.device voice attributes (speed,volume,timbre, etc.) is fully editable by double clicking icons.animouth's drag and drop interface makes sequencing and editing speech with graphics and sounds simple and intuitive. Sequences can be looped or played randomly. The icons may also be instantaneously triggered using the function keys, or by ARexx. The ARexx interface allows creation of animations in resolutions not supported by the native chipset. Using ARexx, animouth can even allow importing mouth positions into 3D programs, such as Lightwave. The interface is organized by Character hierarchy, so voice attributes, images and sounds can be associated with a particular character. Characters can then be saved separately as "kits" with can then be loaded into any project. |
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Minimum: AmigaOS 2.04 and up 1 Meg chip ram 68000 Suggested: AmigaOS 2.04 and up 2 Megs Chip Ram additional Fast Ram 68020 1 meg Hard Drive space animouth requires no external GUI Libraries (such as MUI or ClassAct ) and supports the following file formats: IFF_ILBM , IFF_8SVX , IFF_ANIMbrush , ASCCI text. |