Author: by Staff

Montreal-based animation tools developer Di-O-Matic has announced the release of its Voice-O-Matic v3 lip sync plug-in for Autodesk's 3ds Max. In addition to general improved quality and additional presets and settings, the company says it has added compatibility with 3ds Max 2010, as well as 64-bit support for several other recent versions of 3ds Max. The tech has been adopted by Activision-owned studio Beenox, which used it while developing its movie-licensed games Bee Movie Game and Monsters vs. Aliens. "We rely heavily on Voice-O-Matic in our production workflow for both important first-pass lip-sync shots and important up-close sequences that we can adjust manually," said Beenox technical director of animation Stephane Duchesne. "Many of our junior animators benefit from the automated functionality that Voice-O-Matic offers. At one point, we received [a] job that called for over an hour of production shots to complete in a very short time. Voice-O-Matic helped us meet the deadline and avoid production time and cost overages." Features of the software include phoneme-matching, manual fine-tuning, and support for many languages.