This weekend Peter asked me about animating his minecraft model to talk. So while explaining him the principles like visemes and the classic 9 Disney mouth poses, i started doing a bit of research on text-to-phoneme(-to-viseme) conversion, and started building some code in Unity to automate the process because hand-animating lip sync would be way too time consuming. But of course couldn’t stop just setting the right mouth pose 🙂 …and suddenly they were alive. Here’s the result: (click on the image to start the Unity browser plugin)
Note that there’s no preprocess on the text; they can read anything. The little blue girl for example got the starting lines of the original Star Wars movie, simply copy-pasted from a website.
Actually, thinking of adding some UI to allow typing in text for them to say live. But only if you promise not to type anything rude. 🙂