Animated talking head

Abstract

This project aims to build a 3D animated talking head, which base on English, and the interface to control the 3D head. That means user can control the 3D head to talk with the speech given. After input the sound file and the text, a movie of the 3D talking head with the input can be produced. And the 3D head is lip synchronized with the speech. It is implement by using powerful 3D Drawing software “MAYA”. The 3D head is built up in MAYA environment and using the deformation function in MAYA to deform the 3D head with different mouth shapes. The user interface and the function for producing the 3D talking head movie is written by MAYA script “MEL”. There is also a C program is used for converting the English text into the corresponding Phoneme. Finally the 3D head and the interface are built up in MAYA. The 3D talking head movie with the speech input can be produced. The accuracy of the lip synchronization and comparability of the mouth shapes is acceptable.