So, I put together a little Phoneme Editor of my own. It performs essentially the same function as the "Phoneme/Viseme Properties" dialog, but has some very important improvements.
Features
- Includes an audio sample for every phoneme supported by Face Poser that plays when hovering over each phoneme button. (Provided by the University of North Carolina)
- Pressing "Play" will make the Phoneme Editor read your word aloud using the audio samples so you can check that it sounds right. (No text-to-speech software required!)
- The "Gen" button will prompt for an English word and then convert it to phonemes using a dictionary of over 100,000 words provided by Carnegie Mellon University!
Please note that I put this together in less than a day, so it's probably really inefficient (the audio samples and the 2MB dictionary are kept in memory). It doesn't have any interaction with Face Poser, so you'll have to hit Copy and then paste the phoneme string into the Properties window. I plan to improve it as I move forward with using Face Poser and as you all find bugs and whatnot.
There's a chance that the phonemes won't be generated properly because the CMU dictionary uses some phonemes that Faceposer doesn't support. The unsupported phonemes are mapped to Face Poser phonemes that sound as similar as possible, but I doubt it will sound good all the time.
Regardless, I've still found it to be a HUGE time saver when building phonemes manually.
Download: Phoneme Editor v1.1 (Requires the .NET Framework 2.0)
Enjoy!
Update (Jan 17, 2010):
v1.1 is out! I downgraded the requirements from .NET 3.5 to .NET 2.0. In addition, the phoneme dictionary's file size has been reduced by nearly 60% with the introduction of a binary file format. Phoneme mapping and dictionary transformation is now done when the project is built on my end, which allows for a faster startup time and less memory consumption.