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Preview Lipsync in GECK...?


Budong

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The way most modders seem to test lipsync is to do it in-game, but when these games were made Bethesda/Obsidian recorded and lipsynced thousands of lines of dialog at a time... if they bothered with any sort of quality control at all, they would have needed a faster/easier way to preview lipsync right in the GECK. They gave their people the option to record/playback audio and create lipsync all in one spot in the EditResponse dialog, so it stands to reason that there also might be a way to preview the lipsync too...

 

Okay, so here's some fun stuff first to make a point... Go to your ObjectWindow, open any human NPC in the NPCeditor, switch to the Face tab, and then press the "a" key on your keyboard. Nifty huh? It's previewing all the phoneme shapes used for speech... so we know the NPC editor's render window *could* preview lipsync. Now, consider that OTHER windows in the GECK tend to work together... for example, you'll almost always use the CellView, RenderWindow, and ObjectWindow in concert... one window works WITH another window to accomplish something. The EditResponse and NPCEditor windows might be a similar situation, like having the recording selected in the EditResponse window while you switch to the NPCEditor and do *something* to trigger a preview.

 

Keep in mind, there's a ton of stuff in the GECK that's hiding right in plain sight and completely undocumented. For example... while you're in the NPC editor, did you know that you can right-drag with your mouse on parts of the face to sculpt it instead of using sliders? Did you know you can left-drag the bottom-right border of the face preview and stretch it out to make the preview bigger? That you can press the number keys from 1..0 and SHIFT+1..6 to test emotional morphs on a face? That you can double-click an audio record in the grid below the "Select TESSound" button in the EditResponse dialog to play it? Found those things out mostly by accident... I've never seen anyone mention these tips before though, despite the fact that GECK is a decade old now. What else is hiding in there? ;D The weird one is pressing "v" in the NPCEditor, which opens the mouth ever so slightly but doesn't do much else... Is that a signal for "I'm in standby, ready to test lipsync"? ;D

 

Anyways, enough rambling... my point is: we have a window that obviously *could* do lipsync preview, and the dialog recording/lipsyncing window does everything else... Is there some other hidden feature in the GECK that would make life easier, letting us preview and test our lipsync right after we generate the .lip file? :) It would make sense for it to be there... Has anyone found anything like that?

Edited by Budong
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There are a lot of things the Geck should do, (with far less presumptions needed) that the Geck doesn't do. Bethesda's technical ineptitude extends far beyond just their games.

 

The flex preview I figured was to make sure there wasn't any undesirable clipping that can happen with more "exotic" faces.

Hell, the NV geck isn't even distributed with the files necessary for Lipsync generation to work in the first place. Last I heard it's flat out broken in the FO3 version and requires you to use 3rd party programs. (Or the Oblivion Construction Set.)

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