About DarkVOICES

DarkVOICES allows you to create lip sync mouth movement for your game characters easily, quickly and cost effectively. It is based on the technology of loading in any WAV file that contains speech, and converting it to a series of annotations which describe how the mouth should move.

There are no restrictions in shipping this technology with your application. The data produced from this process simply describes when, what and for how long a certain shape of the mouth should be played for, and can be integrated into whatever system your application uses. The product also includes a sample 3D head model, fully rigged to play the lip sync data. It also comes complete with source code for DarkBASIC Professional.

Features

• Produce mouth movement data from a WAV file, and edit the data for the best results
• Load an existing WAV file or record your own directly within the editing tool
• Command-line EXE provided to convert a directory of WAV files in one go
• Win32 DLL provided to convert WAV files in real-time within your games
• Mouth data stored in a text file, easy to parse by many languages
• License permits all forms of commercial use: 100% Royalty free, no fees

Bonus Material

The following is also included with the DarkVOICES lip-sync application.

• Fully textured high poly head model with full phoneme dictionary of mouth poses
• Full 3DS MAX files for the head model complete with neck, eyes, cheek and jaw bones
• Full DarkBASIC Professional source code to the editing tool
• Demo with source code showing how easy it is to add talking game characters

Price Comparison

This technology is one of the most competitively priced solutions to the challenge of creating realistic talking characters in your game, and has taken the hard work out of producing the results you need, hassle free. You can pay anywhere from $250 to $15,000 for comperable solutions, and many of them are merely supplimentary to even more expensive tools. We have stripped away the mystique of this technology, prepared it for hands-on game development, and set it at a price you can afford.

How Lips In Games Move

How do I make my characters talk?
You can create talking characters by starting with a WAV sound file containing the speech, produce phoneme data from this sound file and animate the mouth of your characters head based on the phoneme data.

What is a Phoneme?
The smallest unit of speech that affects the meaning of a word (a sound unit). The 'c' in cat and the 'm' in mat are phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit of sound in a word. There are approximately 44 phonemes in English (the number varies depending on the accent). A phoneme may be represented by one, two, three or four letters. For the purposes of this technology, we are using one and two letter phoneme representations, and we are only using 10 phoneme variations for the mouth shapes. Game speech does not have to be accurate given the equal importance of overall performance, and 10 phoneme variants are plenty for modern games.

How do I animate the mouth of my own Characters?
You can find video tutorials on The Game Creators web site showing how the Anna model was created in 3D Studio Max. We hope this will point you in the right direction for making your own talking 3D characters for your games. You can of course use Anna and modify her for your own creations.

I have no microphone, where do I get good voices from?
We have used a couple of great web sites for our own voice overs needs and we recommend you review their services: http://www.shockwave-sound.com and http://www.voice123.com

Download Demo

We have prepared a fully working demo of DarkVOICES for you to try out. The download is 55 MB in size. You must have the Microsoft DirectX 9.1c February 2006 Runtime installed, which you can download from here: DirectX Feb 2006.

>>> DarkVOICES Demo Download 55 MB

3DS Max Tutorial Videos

As well as the demo we have also prepared 3 tutorial videos showing how to convert a model from 3DS Max to be suitable for the data DarkVOICES generates. The video files are in WMV (DivX) format.

>>> 3DS Max Tutorial Videos 8.5 MB

Demonstration Video