Took a break from adding animations to characters and tried something for fun ...
This was done using a program called Reallusion CrazyTalk 7 (free in issue 340 of Compute Shopper), you import a still image into CrazyTalk, mark some points for the mouth, eyes, noose and shape of the head, then choose a voice (you can use built in voice recording, audio files, or text to speech to make your own), and it automatically animates the head to talk, which you can then save as a video file.
Obviously the above was a quick attempt to see how it looks so it's a little tacky, I used a single screenshot for it so when it animates it stretches and warps the background.
However it accepts transparent images and a second image for a background, so what I plan to do is to take a screen shot of the character, remove and make transparent the background in GIMP and save that, then take another screenshot of the same location without the character and save that for the background, combine them with a voice in CrazyTalk and save it out as a video file.
Est voila, I now have an animated cut scene of the character talking to me
i7, NV960 4GB, 16GB memory, 2x 4TB Hybrid, Win10.
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