Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

LMP wrote:

Hmm.. I tried this out, and I exported the footage as an avi., but the mouth was overly large and I resized it for a small head. Is this some sort of glitch?

When you are ready with fitting mouth on the head, which "zoom" do you used?
I can remember that David said something about this. All in all, I think the last step then should be to zoom on 100%.
Please try it out, and please report what happends then.

Frogtrap wrote:

I am having some trouble with papagayo. I finished putting the words in the right place and I saved it and when I opened it up again a few minutes later, the sound doesn't come with the synced words! Do you have a solution?

Uhm, no never had this problem.
Which OS you use? Mac, Windows, Linux?
Which version of Papagayo? The modded version, the basic version?
Do the exported DAT-file work in Papagayo?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

It was the zoom. I set it to 100% and it worked. Thanks! mini/smile

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/DaLegoMaster/Other/brook_signature.png

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

I am using the basic version on Windows Vista, and I didn't export it as a .dat file because I didn't fully finish editing it.

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

SlothPaladin wrote:

Is there any way you could add an option to export the video with just the mouth and an alpha channel?

The .avi file is currently assumed to be in 24 bit BGR format. It would be pretty easy to export the frames with only the mouth using an alpha channel in .png format. I'm under the impression that AE should be able to import just about any type of frames.

In theory, GlueFace could read in "raw" frames as well. That's likely to be a bit slow, though - it'll have to open and close a lot of files when you scrub through the timeline. You could get around that by caching all the frames to a single file, but you basically end up with the same thing you would have if you had an uncompressed .avi file in the first place. Well, I guess you'd have support for an alpha channel.;)

Would being able to read "raw" frames in GlueFace be a good feature?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3595/3383135291_5fa2815143.jpg?v=0

This has been the problem with my animation in Glueface. Glueface made my shot negative and cut it a little on the right side and put it on the left. Should I keep editing and will it go back to normal?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Do you use uncompressed AVI?
Seems to be a AVI with Codec.

Which OS you use? Windows, Mac, Linux?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Frogtrap wrote:

Glueface made my shot negative and cut it a little on the right side and put it on the left.

If it's flipped the frame around, then the issue is probably that the video is encoded in a way that GlueFace didn't expect. Occasionally I've seen Java render frames the wrong color, but that's usually when it's memory-starved or confused.

It looks like your .avi has the video encoded in RGB format instead of BGR. Perhaps you could post a short (3 frame or so) version of the .avi file, and I can check out the file's header. I'll probably have to write some code to handle video encoded in that format.:/

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Sounds great, although I have 1 query. Does the minifig have to be directly facing the camera, or can you shoot it from side on and still use Glueface?

I'll test it out soon, although I can't animate right now as I am in the process of moving my studio into my bedroom, rather than having to use my dining room table mini/smile

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

CheeseyBricks wrote:

Sounds great, although I have 1 query. Does the minifig have to be directly facing the camera, or can you shoot it from side on and still use Glueface?

You can animate your fig as like you wish/need.
GlueFace can fit the mouth to these "angles".
You Minifig can walk from left to right, can turn the head from left to right, just like in "usual brickfilms".

The easyest way to do so is to use a blank head, or an head with an polished mouth. So you don´t need to rotoscope the mouth.
But its all written here:
http://bricktrick.de/index-e-glueface-1.php
and here:
http://bricktrick.de/index-e-glueface-3.php

Just play around with it, you will see that everything is possible.

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

OK, Thanks mini/bigsmile

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Someone on a different project is looking into calling MEncoder (a command line program) to transparently serve up the frames to a Java application. If he gets this working, I'll try to incorporate it into GlueFace to replace the code that handles .avi files. That should allow GlueFace to deal with a large variety of files, instead of just uncompressed .avi files. More importantly, it should handle things like the inverted colors and such.

You still might want to stick uncompressed frames, since you lose quality when you compress the image.

I've got no projected date for this happening, though. I'll keep people posted.

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

When I saved my video as an avi. file, I tried to import it to Windows movie maker, Windows movie maker didn't recognize it, so I couldn't finish the video. Did I do something wrong?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

@Director0012
Hm, I tryed this actually with the AVI which is in the example-projet of GlueFace ( http://bricktrick.de/index-softwaredownload.php )
I don´t have any problem.
So please try out the example-video in the example-project.

But, excuse me, why you use the Windows MovieMaker?????
There is much better software outhere....

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

mario72 wrote:

But, excuse me, why you use the Windows MovieMaker?????

Not just Movie maker, there is also virtualdub.

Last edited by Sleuth5000 (March 29, 2009 (04:55pm))

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Ok, I got my video onto windows movie maker, but when I put the audio onto it, the mouth movements didn't match up with the audio.
I used Avidemux to split it into frames and then I used monkeyjam to put the frames back together again. Did that method cause the problem?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

May be yes.
I think you will lost/loose frames with this method.

Why do you split your videos in frames, and why do you bring them laiter together?

->
How do you basicly brickfilming?
Webcam/Digicam?

I don´t understand why you are splitting the avi into frames...

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

mario72 wrote:

I don´t understand why you are splitting the avi into frames...

Well, when I imported it into Avidemux I couldn't find a way to save it as an avi video, but I could split it into frames, so I checked the frame rate, and split it into frames.
What program did you import it to afterwards?

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Director0012 wrote:

When I saved my video as an avi. file, I tried to import it to Windows movie maker, Windows movie maker didn't recognize it, so I couldn't finish the video. Did I do something wrong?

When GlueFace makes a new .avi file, it does this by making a copy of the original .avi file, and then replaces the uncompressed original frame with the new composited frame.

So except for the frame data, the file format should be exactly the same as the original video.

I assume that WMM could play the original video? There are tools for doing video conversion that can be used to get around this problem, but it's a pain to add something else into this toolchain. mini/sad

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Solved my problem! When I saved it as an avi before, I didn't put .avi after the title. Because in MonkeyJam you never have to type it in after the title.And I thought the saving process was just like MonkeyJam!

Re: GlueFace for Mouthanimations

Mario
This is an excellent piece of software. I know that this took a lot of work.

I am glad to see brickfilms have now moved into the era of the talkies! Perhaps a remake of Al Jolson the Jazz singer is now on!

Just a couple of suggestions for future if you are looking for ideas.

1) The head cylinder only moves left to right. I assume that the camera has to be at about the same level as the mouth. How about adding so you can film looking down or up on a characters face? Perhaps a control like a trackerball so you can roll the mouth head up/down/left/right. Also perhaps a ghosted lego head image might make aligning the head a little easier, or a line running down the mouth image so you can align it between the eyes more easily. The line would not appear of course on the final output!

2) The mouth shapes should use the Preston Blair phoneme standard set (10 mouth shapes). From what I can see they use about six. Perhaps you should expand the standard mouth images which are supplied to cover them all. This way transposing lipsync X sheets from Papagayo would be much easier. It would also encourage other artists to stick with this format when designing additional mouth sets for your software.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/martincprice/Helium_Frog/helium_frog_worklog/Preston_Blair_Phonemes.jpg

Last edited by martinprice2004 (May 24, 2009 (04:20pm))

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