Lipsyncing

Are you looking for code and algorithms to use in your own application, or are you looking for 3rd party applications that will generate the lip synching animations?

Good question. Both :-)

But seriously, I'm more looking for papers, algorithms or open source libaries if they exist; either something I could implement myself with some effort or easily plug in. I know of a few commercial packages (anosoft for instance) but paying 2 or 3 grand for such a feature is not really in my budget.

At this point the simplist solution I've come up myself (with acceptable results and minimal amount of effort) is to synchronize the motion of a characters lower jaw (through bones weighted to his mouth) to the amplitude of a speech track, giving the illusion of mouth movement (I think Half-life 1 might have done this).

Thanks for any insights!

Hi,
I dont have any specific links right now, but if you have the plain-text of whats going to be spoken you could look into into IPA (clicky). Basicly they define the distinctive sounds which every word in a certain language is made of. Scanning the text for those phonemes and then playing an according animation should give you decent results.

\edit: sucky english :|