The speech animation editor allows to edit Speech Animations (*.desanim) for your game. This is not an engine resource but game scripts managing an Animators. Speech animators compose of a Rig and Animation resource, Phoneme and Words.

Speech animation is based on the principle of assigning mouth movement to words by knowing what kind of phoneme are present in the word. This is a different approach than using a speech recognition software to obtain mouth movement from voice actor performed lines. Using speech animation actors can speak without any voice actor lines present.

The editor window composes of the preview area and the properties panel on the left side.

The preview window shows the preview of the speech animation. See 3D-View Navigation for how to navigate the view. To see the speech animation you have to assign a Model Resource and Skin Resource in the view panel.

The preview window can show three different animation previews depending on the selection made in the View menu:

• Display Active Phoneme: Shows the selected phoneme
• Display Active Word: Plays back the animation of the selected word in an endless loop with a small pause between each round.

Defines the Rig and Animation resource to use for the speech animation. Both the rig and animation resource are required to be present.

Speech Animation

The Rig and Animation parameters define the Rig and Animation resource to use for the animation.

The Neutral Move parameter defines the Animation Move to use for the neutral mouth state. This is used if no words are spoken.

Phoneme

Phoneme define the individual mouth positions to use. Phonemes are used in words to figure out how to produce mouth movement throughout a word.

The IPA Symbol is the unique identifier of the phoneme. IPA symbols are used so you can use the phonetic writings found in online dictionaries straight away. You can though use any unicode character outside the IPA writing if you want to add special mouth positions.

The Sample Text contains a unicode text shown as representative example word to get an idea how the phoneme sounds. The example text is shown in the phoneme selection as hint.

The Length defines the time in seconds this phoneme has to be spoken. The speech animation system uses these times to calculate the total word speak time. The Conversation Editor and Conversation System uses the calculated total word speak time to calculate the total speak time of an actor. In the Conversation Editor the words spoken can be individually scaled which will uniformly scale all phoneme inside the word.

The Move defines the Animation Move to use for this phoneme. The speech animation system blends between following phoneme to produce a final speech animation.

Word

Words define the individual words the actor can speak. Words compose of a series of phoneme. Using the IPA symbols of the phoneme the word is written using Phonetics. This allows to simply copy phonetics from online dictionaries of any language you need.

The Name is the unique name of the word. This is used by Conversation Editor and Conversation System to match actor speak text lines to animation words. This can be any kind of name including special words representing uttering like *sigh* or *hein?*. The choice is up to you. Using something like an asterisk helps avoid regular text lines picking up a special word by accident.

The Phonetics is the list of phoneme this word composes off as Phonetics. You can add individual phoneme by writing or pasting the IPA symbols into the text field or by using the plus button next to the text field. Pressing the plus button adds the currently selected phoneme from the Phoneme panel at the text cursor.

Preview and simulation parameters can be adjusted in this panel.

The Display panel defines the Model, Skin and Rig resource to use to preview the speech animator. Without

The Camera panel shows the parameters of the camera in the preview view. The values can be manually edited.