Overview
The Character Customizer is a tool that allows for the quick setup of a single-character scene and a set of lines for the character to act out. It offers control over camera angles, backgrounds, voices and facial animation. The goal is to be able to render out movies of the character. Because of this special purpose we opted to create a separate tool. Depending on user feedback we may eventually fold in some of this functionality into VHBuilder.
Quick facts:
Location: /tools/CharacterCustomizer
Users
Set up
The Toolkit is a collection of various components, so there is some manual work required to set everything up for creating movies using the Character Customizer. In general you will need to have the following elements up and running:
Unity (the renderer / game engine)
Character Customizer tool
Supporting VH modules
Instructions for setting up Unity:
Run the Launcher by double clicking 'run-launcher.bat' in the root of your installation directly ('c:\vhtoolkit' by default).
Click on the Advanced button in the lower right corner. This will expand the view to show all components.
In the Renderer row, change some of the start-up parameters:Launch Unity by clicking on the button with the green up arrow icon. Unity may take a while to load and will initially take over the screen before going back to window mode.
- Set Fullscreen to 'false'
- Set Intro to the empty value
- Optionally, set the resolution to your preferred one
Once Unity comes up, select the window and hit the C key on your keyboard to bring up the debug menu (you may need to click away the Tips window, depending on your earlier start-up settings). In the debug menu, select 'Load Customizer'. This will load the scene specifically made for the Character Customizer.
- Note that you can use the M key to toggle between having your mouse cursor and using the mouse button for speech interactions (indicated by the microphone icon in the lower right).
Instructions for setting up the Character Customizer:
In the Launcher, click on the button with the green up arrow in the Character Customizer row in the Tools section.
Instructions for setting up the supporting VH modules:
In the Character Customizer window, go to the System menu and select Launch All.
Install a codec for movie recording
The Character Customizer uses a Unity movie plug-in which in turn uses the video codecs present on your machine. You can try out different ones by selecting them from the Codecs int the Options menu of the Character Customizer. MJPEG may be available and is pretty good. Alternatively, you can install other codecs. The Lagarith video codec is a free lossless codec with good performance. It does produce quite large files, which the Character Customizer automatically converts to a more manageable format. You can find this codec here http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html
Once you have the codec installed, you can select the codec from the Character Customizer by going to Options->Codec in the menu. Your movies will now be recorded using this codec. If a specified codec cannot be found, uncompressed video will be produced. (note that you can see a warning of this in the Unity console window when you select a non-existing codec; hit the ~ key in the Unity window to bring up the console).
For more detailed information on how to use the recording plugin for Unity, please refer to http://www.renderheads.com/portfolio/UnityAVProMovieCapture/docs/UnityAVProMovieCapture.pdf
Make changes globally to several or all lines in a project
Most settings are saved per utterance. You can select multiple utterances and change the setting for all selected ones at once. You can select multiple lines by:
Holding the mouse button and drag up and down over the lines.
Adding individual lines to your selection by holding the CTRL button and clicking lines with the mouse.
Adding a range of lines by selecting the first line with the mouse button, then select the last line while holding the Shift key.
You can select all lines by clicking a single line and then use CTRL + A.
Add new lines and speech
You can add new lines by typing them into the text box on the utterance list and hitting enter.
For each line you can there are three ways of getting the character to speak the line:
Use text-to-speech. This is the default and you don't need to do anything for this. You can however change the voice from the Voice pull down menu in the Settings tab, and clicking the Set button
Record your own voice. Hold down the Record button while speaking the line. Make sure toUse a prerecorded audio wave files. The spoken text in this file needs to match the text depicted in the line exactly.
- Start speaking immediately after pushing the button
- Hold the button continuously while speaking
- Release immediately after done speaking
- Read the line accurately, since both the text and audio is used for creating a lip synching schedule
Play a line
Either double click the line or click the Play button in the Line panel.
Change the background
There are several ways to change the background:
Select a pre-existing option from the Backdrop pull down menu at the top and click Set
Click Browse to choose one of your own pictures; these ideally are very wide in order to fill the entire backdrop without too much stretching; the aspect ratio is roughly 5:2
Click Color to open a color picker; this adds a hue to the existing picture. You can for instance use the existing Gradient01 background and select any color you want. Note that the default color selections are very bold; it is advised to click Define Custom Colors in the picker to select a more subtle one. This hue will also work on photo's.
Change the camera
You can select a pre-defined camera from the Camera list in the Settings pane and click Set. Note that you can also directly move the camera around in Unity with the W, A, S & D keys. Any changes won't be saved, however.
Change the character's gaze direction
By default the character looks at the Medium Center camera. To change the target, select one from the Gaze Target pull down menu and click Set. Alternatively, you can turn on Always Gaze At Camera in the Options menu.
Change nonverbal behavior
The Nonverbal Behavior Generator analyses the text a character says and dynamialy generates a behavior schedule for SmartBody to execute. You can turn off individual behaviors with the check boxes in the Settings pane. Furthermore, you can toggle whether the character will dislay ilde fidget behaviors (looking around, stretching. etc.) in the Options menu.
Record a movie
Make sure you have good codec installed first, like Lagarith, see above. After that, you can hit the Rec button in the Video panel at any time. Clicking it the first time will start the recording, clicking it a second time will stop the recording. These recorded movies by default are very large, so by default they are converted to a more manageable MP4 format. You can turn this behavior on and off in the Options menu.
You can also render all lines in a row as a batch from the Options menu. Note that this may take some time and that the subtitles may not fully line up. Also make sure that the first line is a text-to-speech line, as otherwise a bug will result in the same audio clip being used for all lines.
Record in-game audio and microphone audio at the same time
Currently this plugin only supports recording audio from a single Windows audio device. There is a “trick” you can use though. In Windows 7 (and perhaps Vista) you may be able to set your microphone to play through the speakers by going to: Control Panel > Sound > Recording > Select your microphone > right click >Properties > Listen > check "Listen to this device". You should then hear your microphone recording through your speakers. It’s recommended to use headphones during recording to prevent feedback from the speakers into the microphone.
In order for you to be able to see the 'Listen to this device' option, please make sure that you have installed the correct drivers for your soundcard.
Known Issues
- For now, always explicitly use Save Project As, instead of just Save Project, since the latter may overwrite the wrong project file
- When loading an existing project, the Camera list may be empty, which prevents you from adding more lines; set the camera as desired to fix this
- The GUI does not always accurately reflect all settings properly when setting a new character or loading a new project
- The background looks washed out; as a work around, you can play around with the color picker to see add a darker grey hue to the picture
- At times the background turns black; using the color picker here should reset it
- Text-to-speech may become unstable when changing the voice often on an existing line
- The Always Gaze at Camera option may interfere with the saving of manually set gaze targets
- If the first line uses a pre-recorded or user recorded audio file, batch video exporting does not work; as a work-around, you can make the first line text-to-speech
- Subtitles in batch mode may look odd, timing wise
FAQ
See Main FAQ for frequently asked questions regarding the installer. Please use the Google Groups emailing list for unlisted questions.