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Description
I am fond of "toon" style graphics, but I like the old school flat cartoons with outlines. Years ago I started using Poser. The first poser version I used was Poser 5 and it did a pretty good job of making toon style animations. In those days flash was a big deal and I found I could import poser animations into flash and add special effects, like explosions and flames pretty easily.

Six or seven years ago, I laid poser aside and started playing around with blender. Blender is hard to learn, but you can produce some amazingly realistic renders. I have seen some Blender tutorials about making toon style renders, but it looks hard. Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

Recently I got frustrated with Blender and decided to revisit poser. Although I have not used it much in a long time, I have upgraded as far as Poser 11. There is a Poser 13 available now, but I think I will pass on that one. What I have been working on with poser is learning to use the lipsyncing feature. If you are using the installed content that comes with Poser 11, you can use a feature called "talk designer" that will automatically translate a sound file into phonemes animate the facial features of your character.

What I have been attempting is a little more challenging. I wanted to load a character from my old Poser 5 resources and make him talk. To some extent, Poser 11 is backward compatible with earlier versions of poser. Poser 5 came with some figures from Poser 4 installed. I was able to load a figure called "poser 4 casual boy" into poser 11 and get some nice cartoon style renders. The talk designer feature, however, does not work for this figure. The reason it does not work is that the talk designer requires something called a "viseme" file which tells poser 11 how to translate phonemes into facial morphs.

I haven't been able to figure out how to create a viseme file for an old poser 4 figure, so I decided to do it the old fashion way, which was manually pose the facial features of the figure to make the mouth move a bit while the sound is playing. This video is a very short test movie of the results of that experiment. The animation is a bit over simplified in that I did not put in all of the nuances of the lips and tongue. Basically what I did was open the mouth when the waveform shows audio data, then close it at the end of the word. It's crude, but it is a beginning.

This probably will lead nowhere, but I do enjoy solving useless little technical puzzles. It is at least as satisfying as working crossword puzzles in New Yorker magazine.

There is another demo using poser 7, Retro Graphics 2.

Description
I am fond of "toon" style graphics, but I like the old school flat cartoons with outlines. Years ago I started using Poser. The first poser version I used was Poser 5 and it did a pretty good job of making toon style animations. In those days flash was a big deal and I found I could import poser animations into flash and add special effects, like explosions and flames pretty easily.

Six or seven years ago, I laid poser aside and started playing around with blender. Blender is hard to learn, but you can produce some amazingly realistic renders. I have seen some Blender tutorials about making toon style renders, but it looks hard. Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

Recently I got frustrated with Blender and decided to revisit poser. Although I have not used it much in a long time, I have upgraded as far as Poser 11. There is a Poser 13 available now, but I think I will pass on that one. What I have been working on with poser is learning to use the lipsyncing feature. If you are using the installed content that comes with Poser 11, you can use a feature called "talk designer" that will automatically translate a sound file into phonemes animate the facial features of your character.

What I have been attempting is a little more challenging. I wanted to load a character from my old Poser 5 resources and make him talk. To some extent, Poser 11 is backward compatible with earlier versions of poser. Poser 5 came with some figures from Poser 4 installed. I was able to load a figure called "poser 4 casual boy" into poser 11 and get some nice cartoon style renders. The talk designer feature, however, does not work for this figure. The reason it does not work is that the talk designer requires something called a "viseme" file which tells poser 11 how to translate phonemes into facial morphs.

I haven't been able to figure out how to create a viseme file for an old poser 4 figure, so I decided to do it the old fashion way, which was manually pose the facial features of the figure to make the mouth move a bit while the sound is playing. This video is a very short test movie of the results of that experiment. The animation is a bit over simplified in that I did not put in all of the nuances of the lips and tongue. Basically what I did was open the mouth when the waveform shows audio data, then close it at the end of the word. It's crude, but it is a beginning.

This probably will lead nowhere, but I do enjoy solving useless little technical puzzles. It is at least as satisfying as working crossword puzzles in New Yorker magazine.

There is another demo using poser 7, Retro Graphics 2.