CrazyTalk 5.0
Reallusion, Inc.
Released Jan 23, 2008

“There is a need for accessible animation tools that don't require a degree to learn”
-John Martin, Reallusion

I don't know about you, but I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting software. The problem is that there is just so much of it. How do you know what is good? Well, reviews like this one will hopefully steer you in the right direction. But there's also that connection of friends, forum buds and co-workers who end up telling you about some very cool program that you have just got to get right now!

That was exactly how I found out about CrazyTalk a few years ago. Deep into work on several machinima films, I was annoyed at how badly the lip-sync was on some of the characters I was seeing. Then my friend Tom Jantol wrote at mprem.com that he had discovered a remarkable tool that not only allows you to create near flawless lip-sync for practically any still image, but the program also allows you to key-frame facial animation and then export the entire thing as a video file. And on top of that it was cheap and very simple to learn.

 

The model work area where you make adjustments to the image you've imported

When I downloaded the demo (I think it was the 3.0 version then), I immediately understood what Tom was saying and bought the full version to play with. Let me tell you a bit about how the program works; CrazyTalk is a program that allows you to use any still image and add animation and lip-sync to audio you've imported or recorded from within the program itself. You can then adjust any aspect of the animation and export it in a variety of popular media formats (still image, video). I've been using CrazyTalk for a few years now and I'm still finding new ways to use the program. I've sent video cards to my friends of animated photos of myself; I've created lip-sync for close-ups in machinima films and I've animated drawings and non-human images for various media projects I've worked on.

Now comes version 5.0 of CrazyTalk, released by Nashville-centered Reallusion on January 23, 2008. And, man, I want to tell you this is the best version yet of CrazyTalk. I've been impressed with the people I've met from Reallusion. This is a company that not only works to create quality software, but listens to it's customer base. CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 has more functionality, more ease of use, and more power to create your own custom animated characters than any other version.

You can fine-tune the mesh by zooming in and making very subtle adjustments

CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 adds three new elements to the program that kicks it into another level. It's now a program that is not only for the casual user who might just want to animated their avatar, but for serious filmmakers who want an inexpensive, but powerful way of creating facial animation and lipsync for characters in their film. Enhanced facial mesh (with jaw bone added), export to flash function and the ability to record facial puppeteering and save it in layers as motion clips for every feature of your live puppet session. This last addition is a home-run for Reallusion, because machinima filmmakers can now create their own facial animation for close-ups by simple capturing the first frame of the close-up, animating within CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 and then exporting to the media format for use in a digital video editor. And there is a wide variety of export formats now, including high def and direct to You Tube format.

Some other new additions to CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 include:

-Ability to create custom “motion clips” of your animations and layer them on the time-line.
-8 new facial profiles for non-human characters including animals, cartoons and machines.
-You can use a mouse or another animation device (tablet) to control facial animation in real time.
-Custom eyes and teeth can be imported and fitted to your characters.
-3 default standby motions and the ability to create your own custom standby motions and save them.
-Text bubble SFX can be added to character and the ability to place them in the foreground/background
of the image.
-Enhanced time-line editor with improved look and ease of use.

The new live puppeteering panel allows you to fine tune your facial animations in real time

In testing the new CrazyTalk Pro 5.0, I created several simple projects that took me through almost all of the programs functions. For my first test, I took a clip (a close up) from a machinima film I've been collaborating on for the last several months and tried to make the existing facial animation more subtle. In the clip, the character is coming out through the front door of a restaurant where he is confronted with a hit man who shoots him. The first part of the clip shows the original animation created using Gary's Mod and the second clip is the animation created using CrazyTalk Pro 5.0. My goal was to change the facial animation from an exaggerated style to one that was more subtle and in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. The only problem I had with creating the new animation was that for some reason I wasn't able to keep the teeth I had created for the character while I was recording the puppeteering footage. This may be some setting I'm not understanding, or it could be a small bug.

The second test was of a drawing I knocked out quickly and imported into CrazyTalk Pro 5.0. I simply let the program run on automatic and chose what I thought was a voice that matched the character. You can see that the animation came out just fine even on the default settings. I could also have chosen a text-to-speech option and morphed the voice with several voices included with CrazyTalk Pro 5.0

And for the third test, I scanned an illustration of George Washington from an old pre-1900's American History textbook and tried some live puppeteering to get the eyes to move and the face to sneer. It was no problem getting the animations adjusted on the timeline and layering them in just the way I wanted. The CrazyTalk interface is very simple and intuitive. Ease of use is one of CrazyTalks best features.

While CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 is an excellent product, there are some areas the program could improve on. Sergio, in his excellent review of CT 4.5 here at Renderosity.com, mentioned that the “save” function of the program is slightly confusing. Rather than the typical “file-save-save as” that you find on most Windows-based programs there is an “add to” for both the model (picture) you've imported and the animation script that is created when you animate the image. Having two separate file types for one project complicates the saving process and is really the only aspect of the program that seems counterintuitive.

At present, you can only animate one image at a time in CrazyTalk. I'd very much like to see Reallusion develop future versions of CrazyTalk that can allow for at least two images to be animated so they can interact with each other. At present, you have to chroma-key your image and join the image in a video editor package like Sony Vegas. CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 makes it easy to key out the background of your image and export it, but it would be great if you could do it all within CrazyTalk.

Reallusion's CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 is an outstanding software program that can be used by just about
anyone interested in animating their avatar, creating a fun video of your friends, sending animated postcards, creating hand-drawn lip-synced animations or for developing facial animation and lip-sync for machinima characters. It is a simple, but very powerful program that is so easy to use just about anyone will be importing and animating their images within minutes.

CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 comes in two flavors; one is simply CrazyTalk 5.0, then there's CrazyTalk Pro 5.0. CrazyTalk Pro is the way to go since it includes more precise tools to tailor your animations than the simpler CT 5.0. Both can be purchased as upgrades for a very reasonable price, or bought outright. While the purchase price is higher than most share-ware programs, Reallusion has put a lot of time and effort into making a superior software program – and it shows. The support both on the Reallusion site and via YouTube tutorials is excellent. No question that both the program and the upgrade are worth the price.

Reallusion's other flagship program, IClone (a terrific animation engine for machinima and 3d moviemaking) is being released in version 3.0 in March. If the quality of upgrade is as good as CrazyTalk Pro 5.0, then the combination of the two programs will really be something. For less than the cost of a highend video card, you can have your own 3d animation studio. Remarkable.

My thanks to Reallusion and John Martin for providing a review copy of CrazyTalk Pro 5.0

Notes:

In over 8 hours of use, CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 never crashed or hitched on me once. My test rig is one that I recently built for Christmas. Here are the specs:

Windows XP Sp2
Abit P35 Pro Mobo
2G DDR2 PC3200 Mushkin Ram
Quad core CPU: Q6600
XFX Nvidia 8800GT Graphics Card
WD Raptor 150Gb Main Hard-drive.
Dell 24” LCD Monitor.

The main site at Reallusion.com is the first place to go. There are also some very well done tutorials for just about every step of the animation process for CrazyTalk at You Tube.

Second Life machinima filmmakers have been very interested in CrazyTalk, since there is no lip-sync for the Second Life engine. CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 should be a boon to the machinima community there.

The feature matrix for CrazyTalk 5.0 and CrazyTalk Pro 5.0 is here.

For those who want to use their CrazyTalk 4.5 projects in this new 5.0 version, Reallusion has provided a content wizard to copy them to CrazyTalk 5.0 (both versions).

Tom Jantol, who won the European Machinima Festival's “Best Experimental Film” award this last summer, has a website where you can see some of his work.

Machinima Premiere (mpem) is a very good site for learning more about machinima.

Information about Gary's Mod is here.

And anyone who is using the current version of Iclone (2.5) will be disappointed that they have to wait until version 3.0 in March before they can integrate CrazyTalk 5.0. This new version of CrazyTalk is incompatible with Iclone 2.5.

And for anyone interested in a spectacular use of CrazyTalk in a machinima film, watch BEAST by Leo Lucien-Bay. The lip-sync and facial animation was created using CrazyTalk 4.6.

Also, be sure to check out Reallusion's Store in the Renderosity MarketPlace!

Ricky Grove [gToon], Contributing Columnist with the Renderosity Front Page News. Ricky Grove is a bookstore clerk at the best bookstore in Los Angeles, the Iliad Bookshop. He's also an actor and machinima filmmaker. He lives with author, Lisa Morton, and three very individual cats. Ricky is into Hong Kong films, FPS shooters, experimental anything and reading, reading, reading. You can catch his blog here.