All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the next in a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months, VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to open and work with the Talk Designer.

You open the Talk Designer, shown in Figure 1, using the Window, Talk Designer menu command. This interface lets you load sound files, configure the interface and set any head motions and emotional tweaks.

New Poser 7 Feature
The Talk Designer interface is a new feature in Poser 7.

[Figure 1] Talk Designer palette (left). [Figure 2] Supplemental text area (right).

Loading a Sound File
Sound files can be loaded directly into the Talk Designer using the Load Files button located at the top of the interface. You can also load sound files into the Talk Designer using the File, Import, LipSync Audio menu. This loads and opens the Talk Designer in one action. The file types that can be loaded into the Talk Designer include WAV files for Windows computers and AIFF files for Macintosh computers.

Loading a Supplemental Text File
To better identify various words in a speech, you can load or enter the text that is spoken in the sound file into the Supplemental Text area. If you click the Load File button, you can load a text file that includes the spoken words, or you can click directly on the plus icon to the left of the Supplemental Text label. A text area, shown in Figure 2, then opens where you can type the text directly.

Loading an External Viseme Map File
When a figure makes phonemes, which are the various sounds of speech, such as Ah, Oh, Ch, Em and so on, the face has a shape (or a morph target) associated with the sound. For example, when a figure makes an Oh phoneme, the mouth is open and the lips are pulled in to create an O shape, as shown in Figure 3.

Most of the Library figures included in Poser 7 include phonemes morph targets by default. You can look for these facial morph targets by selecting the Head element and opening up the Parameters palette. If the figure includes these morph targets, there will be parameter dials under the Face Morph, Phonemes section of the Parameters palette. The common phonemes for default figures include A, CH, E, F, TH, O, M, U, W and L, as shown in Figure 4. The default Viseme Map files are located in the LipSync folder where Poser is installed.