Lip Syncing with Puppet Works’ MAYA Voice Works Plugin

Puppet Works has announced the release of Voice Works, its software based character lip sync plugin for MAYA software. By automatically processing the audio file of a character’s voice track, Voice Works creates lip sync animation in MAYA. Voice Works takes advantage of ProductionSync, a proprietary, production-based voice recording analysis software from San Francisco-based Automatic Sync Technologies. Voice Works uses this phoneme recognition technology to identify key phonetic events in an audio file (.wav file) and automatically places keys directly into the MAYA animation timeline. The animator is then able to quickly move on to the addition of emotional expressions and other artistic elements. Processing and key creation is typically accomplished at a faster than real-time rate. Voice Works is integrated within MAYA with no separate files or file formats. Scenes animated using Voice Works can be directly handed off to other members of the animation team for tweaking and additional animation, even if the rest of the team isn’t using Voice Works. The Voice Works plugin for MAYA V3.0 is priced at $795 and is available for immediate trial download.