Text-to-speech has been around a long time. In fact, it has been under development for so long it is now taken for granted. iClone has a built-in text-to-speech converter.

The text-to-speech feature is a very simple and straightforward tool. You will find the feature under the Animation tab, Facial Animation button, then over to right menu for the Text-to-Speech section under the Import Voice/Add Emotion section.

Select the proper character and type in the dialog and you have instant voices for your characters. To have a conversation between two characters you must highlight each character while typing in that character's dialog:

Text-to-speech options include:

There are many voices available out there but Microsoft Anna was the only voice that was installed on my system. AT&T and other vendors have commercial voices available too. Just search the Internet for AT&T Labs and Cepstral online demos. There are male and female voices as well as accented voices.

While text-to-speech voices are nice they are not capable of producing a decent dialog and will detract from any animation work no matter how good it may be. In fact, in The Movies Underground community it is one of the most common complaints and almost no movie made with text-to-speech voice gets out unscathed.

The argument against using text-to-speech is that it always takes away from good work created by the filmmaker, as some viewers are so opposed to hearing it they cannot get into the storyline. No matter how good the voice synthesis may be, the majority of viewers do not like mechanical voices unless the characters are robots.

None the less the feature is available and has its place and its uses but don't expect mainstream media viewers to be impressed with the faulty diction and sometimes horrid delivery.

If your voice actors are available or if you do some of your own voice overs, Reallusion has included a direct recording option. This option works with the system sound card and microphone. If the computer system recognizes the microphone then iClone should recognize it too.

To record directly into iClone your computer system must have a properly functioning microphone and sound system. Headset microphones can work and produce good quality recordings but if you wish to get a superior recording then good microphones can make a big difference in quality.

The popup Record wave dialog is simple and efficient, providing an easy interface to control the recording. Included is a play feature to replay what you just recorded before continuing:

Direct recording might not be feasible for all projects or all aspects of a project but it can produce great results in terms of sound quality, dependent on your sound components.

Audio files are the most common method of importing dialog into iClone. The method is straightforward .

Only WAV and MP3 formats are compatible at this time.

We will be using dialog in the next chapter so to be prepared for this let's go over the basics of importing or loading dialog into a character.

The basic steps are as follows:

It cannot be stressed enough that dialog recordings need to be in the highest quality possible when the actor is recording the dialog. Quality microphones make a huge difference in lip-sync and other aspects of dialog.

There several great open source and inexpensive audio editing software applications available to fit our needs. My personal favorite low-cost audio editor is Goldwave (www.goldwave.com), and the open source Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) is priced even better, it's free!

Some of the more compelling features of Goldwave are the Copy and Paste New buttons that with two mouse clicks can copy and then paste that copy into a newly opened file. This is handy when an actor sends in their lines in one or several large files that require the lines to be edited out into individual files. Goldwave also has good noise filtering, hum/buzz removal, and other features like volume control that can increase or decrease volume. It also has pop and click removal which is present in a lot of PC recordings. A pop screen for your microphone can help to reduce or eliminate that problem too.