animating Dialog
 

Is there any easy way to animate dialog in lightwave? like maybe importing a wave file onto the time line so you can match the mouth movements with the exact sylables frame for frame:headbang: there has to be an easy way.

pls help
thx::D

Not sure what you mean by "easy way." You certainly can import sound to the timeline tho.

To do that go to your scene editor and click the "Audio" dropdown, and that will allow you to import a .wav file, and once you load it, it will automatically put teh file in the time line for you. You change the start time of the audio from the same drop down. Now you can hear and scrub the audio and everything with your animation.

You can't render out an animation with sound from LightWave unfortunately. If you render a preview it will playback the sound with the preview, and you can save out the preview with sound, but there's no way to get sound when you F10 the scene. At least not prior to v[8].

There are a few commercially available products for doing lipsync for LightWave, but I can't remember any off hand as they're usually really pricy and as such of no real interest to me.

LW ships with a demo (v8 anyway) of Mimic by Daz Studio. I tried it out but it's no substitute for the traditional way of mapping out your phonemes on an x-sheet and keying your morphs. IMHO, you spend just as much time tweaking the Mimic results as you would just keying in the MorphMixer.

I agree with Towerfan.

Here are a few x-sheets/lipsync tools:

http://www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpie.html

http://www.lostmarble.com/papagayo/index.shtml

http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkey...jam/index.html