Dialogue Pictures Help

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spacedcase · #1 Post by **spacedcase** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:23 am

Hello again! I just have a few questions about dialogue pictures.
1. What is the standard size/resolution for a dialogue picture?
2. Is a solid, neutral color the best choice for a background in such a picture?
3. When you animate a dialogue picture, you loop a mouth opening and closing, rather than animate the ennunciation of every word, correct? (I suppose you could do it the second way, it just seems like a lot of trouble.)
4. Can you reccomend any good (preferably free) programs one could use to animate a dialogue picture?
5. This isn't really a question, I'd just like some feedback on a (fairly sketchy) picture I just made, took about 40 minutes, and I'd like some input from the more experienced folks. (I think her neck and shoulders are pretty wonked.)

#2 Post by **navynuke04** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:29 am

Nice work. That's really good.

The easy way is to just animate the mouth opening and closing. You can also animate a head nod if you want. See KQ2VGA for an example. If you want to get really tricky, you can draw a different mouth position for each phoenem (sp?) and then animate the portrait per spoken line. There is a (free) program called Pamela you can use to help animate dialouge portraits once you've made you basic mouth positions.

AGS also supports blinking views, which means you could get really complex and do lip synching as described above, but also have different eye positions to show facial expressions. KQ6 was a good example of this (though it wasn't made with AGS). I'm not sure if anyone has gone this complex with AGS yet.

Swift · #3 Post by **Swift** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 5:05 am

Nice pic.

Klytos · #4 Post by **Klytos** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 7:20 am

navynuke04 wrote:You can also animate a head nod if you want. See KQ2VGA for an example.

Please don't. Seriously that was the only bad thing in the game.

Great picture by the way.

#5 Post by **Erpy** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 8:57 am

There's only between 8 and 10 different mouth positions you need to create for a dialogue portrait to have it suitable for lipsyncing. (the S and the Z-phonemes look just about the same when someone pronounces them)

If you're not having a voicepack, there's no need to worry about lipsyncing, but you should still create positions like the O, the A, the B and several others to make the speech look natural.

Alliance · #6 Post by **Alliance** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 3:52 pm

Dialogue animations? Hard? :lol

They're easy! Well for me anyway, but then again I'm strange.
I'l try and make it animated to give you an idea of what it should look like.

Meerbat · #7 Post by **Meerbat** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 11:28 pm

1. I am not sure if there is a standard size, but 120x120 pixels is a good orientation for a square-shaped portrait. In your case I'd go with 120x96.
2. I would say some sort of color-gradient or even an appropriate background like sky, wall, etc. look much better than a solid color.
3. Depending on how easy you want to get away with it, you can do with 3 to 10 frames. What I usually do is use a closed mouth for most of the vowels and alternate with an a/e vowel, i vowel and o/u vowel and a blinking frame.
4. I use GifConstructionSet, but only because Navy recommended it to me some months ago

So I guess Pamela would be a better choice now...
5. The best way to correct posture, center of gravity and symmetry issues is to mirror your drawing and see if any irregularities stand out.
It appears that she is leaning backwards. Just try to think how she would have to move to straighten her position and make the appropriate changes, on her mirror image first, then mirror it again and see if it looks better, and so on and so fort... I would start by moving her left shoulder up and her cleavage to the left.

I really like the color scheme you used, the shading of her skin and the strands of her hair (the dishevelled look too). Great work so far, keep it up!

#8 Post by **Erpy** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 11:48 pm

4. I use GifConstructionSet, but only because Navy recommended it to me some months ago So I guess Pamela would be a better choice now...

Pamela isn't a utility to create graphics. It's a program to create pam-files which AGS can in turn use to add lipsynchronisement when the corresponding voice-file is played.

Meerbat · #9 Post by **Meerbat** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 5:51 am

Thanks, Erpy. My bad.