Character Voices
Community Forums/General Help/Character Voices
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| Where would you ask for people to speak the Voices of the Characters of a Game Project? Currently I am thinking about to make everything in german and then simply try to hire some people around me, but even then it's not so easy because they speak swiss german, that's massively derivated from official German Language. I'd prefere english, but my english is rather broken, so I would also need somebody to correct the texts. One further point for german. Isn't there some kind of community of upcoming professional Voices? I'd also use a speech program if it sounds natural enough. Currently I am using an old MSAgent Speech Program to create placeholders. Is there any real good speech program around? |
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| Are you looking for english/scottish speaking voices? |
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| the main problem with some voice acting in game cut scenes is the actors may not be in the same room as each other to talk to each other or recorded on different days. you can loose alot of emotion and pacing cold reading to a microphone if ive got a rant on and want to record it, i normally wait till "the idiot" asks if i fancy a pint and go to the local with my podcasting gear. i find it easier to talk to someone than a microphone in my room, the only problem is when im asking rhetorical questions hell answer them, or just interupt my flow with some random pointless comment |
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| Firstly, you must know a few guys from whom you can get somewhat of a performance for your dialogues. Note that not anybody can do that - it requires the person to have been bitten by the Acting bug. EDIT: It's also imperative that you be very professional in directing the guy's voice as to get the most conveying performance. With that in mind, you need to go to a silent, muffled room (speaking to an open closet full of clothing might help), and record with a good portable recorder, like the Zoom H2. The key is to go to a place without any room-tone at all, so that you can add the one you like in the Mixing of your game audio, with Reverberation and Panning. After all, you can't make a guy sound like he's in an open field if his voice sounds like he's speaking inside a room, right? If you're willing to pay, you can find many talents here: http://voice123.com/ (99% of which are willing to work from a distance) |
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| i have the zoom h4 and h2, the h2 for my vocal recordings and the h4 when i use it is strictly for my bass fx thingies, i tried its built in mics and found it lacking somewhat, plus its more unweildy than a microphone with its 360 degre recording option im able to move freely with it on a table and keep talking if i like edit: swapped h2 for h4, i forgot which was which without looking and counted the mics not the tracks it can record |
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| A bit of Googling for "voice acting" turns up a large number of possibilities:- http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=%22voice+acting%22&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 |
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| I have a pretty good set up, good mics with very little noise pick ups. Also do some singing, so i can give it a go if you wish, to see what your after. |
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| Thanks for your answers. You're right, both is important: recording quality (dry, clean, min 44.kHz16b), but also actor qualities. With diffrent accents it may be possible to use one voice for a number of characters, including the use of a few halftones pitchshifting and individual reverb etc. But it's rather impossible to make a female voice out of a male one. (Pitch shifting alone won't do it). There is indeed an amateur voice actors community, not sure why I didn't see this yet. Might be a good idea to register there. Although I'm afraid this is going to cost some money, probably a lot (or in other words: the more dialogs, the more costs). Maybe I'll try to combine real voices with TTS ones. But I'd have to find a good TTS app first. It would however make the production much easier. Ross, thanks for your offer, I've noticed it and will contact you later. Scottish might fit in perfectly when I storywise set that castle map location to Scotland. Currently I'am working on Mesh content, but I hope I can work on the dialogs soon. It's kind of a challenge anyway to do dialogs with lipsync motion in a FPS, made by a Blitz Indie Bedroom Inc... I mean, without Mimic Mocap and other costy things. But it's quite fun when it starts working to some degree. |
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| dialogs with lipsync motion in a FPS, made by a Blitz Indie Bedroom Inc... I mean, without Mimic Mocap and other costy things. Thats an interesting goal to aim for, briefly tried myself but gave up... |
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| I am interested in this. An email was sent to you, jfk. |
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| I tried this once but i hate sound of my own voice so it kind of puts me off. :D |
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| we all hear our voices differently to how others hear it i dont recognise my voice when played back and since having most of my teef yanked out last year i dont recognise my voice full stop apparantly, well this is off a guy who was told by someone else, we 'hear' the vibrations of our bodies just as much as the sound hitting our ear drums, hence the difference. when i first heard my voice played back, i put it down to a naff tape recorder/mic, yet even using a tascam porta studio and twiddling it never sounded like i sound to myself and myself, im too prone to swearing and going off script so im not much help to anyone unless you want a torrets suffering homeless character voiced ;) |
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| Yeah, the vibrations you hear through your jaw, totally alter the way out voices sound to ourselves. It adds bass to your voice and slightly alters the pitch, if memory serves me correctly. Confidence is the most important thing is your doing voice work though. If you have no confidence in your voice, you will generally always sound terrible. |
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| Hehe, I was singer in a lot of bands. It's true, when you first hear your voice from recordings, it sounds terrible, and very "diffrent". But then you become familar with it. Sammy - I didn't get your mail. Blitzplotter - if you want to do this in industry quality, then it costs money. For the Mocap, as well as the Voices etc. Special Models are needed, Companies often make their own Character File Format. The way I do it is very simple and limited. I don't use animated bones for the face, but a special texture for the face with a small number of phonetic/mimic variations (m,o,s etc). Then the string is parsed and the guessimated mime/texture is applied during the voice sound output. It's not perfect, of course. |
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| @jfk: Did your email was "han---------@..." - represents some characters I used this before when I asked CSP engine questions. Or is there any new contact method? I am really interested in this! (BTW, I just re-sent the email again. Hope you could receive it.) :D |
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| just for s**ts and gigles could you post a sample piece of NPC dialoge with voice directions (otherwise i might read it dry) eg "welcome to my shop, how may i be of service?" "that axe costs fifteen gold." "i could always show you some of my less expencive weapons." "good day to you sir." "good day to you madam." or whatever the word you would use for female adventurers, im not sure id call a xena type woman madam may i interest you in some of our leather gimp apparalle? very durable in battle and adds +x fear to your opponants when [snip ;) ] edit: i once read a tom tom script out for the idiot, i did it in one take where as he got someone to record one line, save it as a file, record the next ... rince and repeat, i told him its better to record it all at once then cut it up post production and to top it all the girl he recorded was door stopped at 2am and half asleep recording it, i would have told him where to go. so lines like that will be x gold are probably better off using blocks that line will be number coinage (gold silver whatever) and for the numbers just record 1 2 3 ... 10 11 12 13 ... 20 30 40 etc making 35 from the 30 and the 5 samples |
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| Cool, i can record some of that and post it. Dunno whether to go for my sean connery impression though :P What tone are you looking for? Proud tone? Angry? Hassled? Friendly? Sneaky? |
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| i probably cant do anything about it today as guy upstairs is off and is a drummer, so i cannot guarantee if he'll practice or not and i live on a busy main road unless you want a bus driving by for added ambience (great for atmosphere in yeolde medievil worlds) but a script snippet would be nice or ill just record what i posted up there hell ill probably just do it anyway ;) it took me an age to do my xmas story this year due to the road, drumming/other house members arguing and stupid finishing hours at work, but i live in a semi rural area and have plenty of fields to sit in with my recorder and a print out |
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| Sammy just suggested to make use of MorphVOX Pro. I didn't try it yet (thought it may be a toy only) but probably it's good enough to create a variation of characters, from one single persons voice. Got to check the audio distribution rights in the EULA.. |
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