This product lets human characters talk. Characters from the City Sample Crowd or MetaHuman Creator characters visualize speech by animate the lips in their face and display speech bubbles. The plugin assists developers importing text-to-speech assets they generated and downloaded from Amazon Polly, then to animate Meta Human faces to visualize talk and optionally show speech bubbles (or use other caption system).

• Video with Sample: click

• An overview of the available voices is available here.

It is intended as a low cost alterative of lips-synchronization for game creators and virtual production, offering a new opportunity for a multi-lingual visual, virtual production.

Process:

• Create and Download the speech files for your text from Amazon using Polly with your web browser.

• Import sound (need to convert to wav) and speechmarks (asset supported by plugin) into unreal.

• Optional: Editor Asset Utility allows to assign subtitles from speechmarks to sound wave.

• No runtime access to AWS is required; all sound files are imported during development.

• Configure characters in world outliner or sequencer. Most code is encapsulated in Actor Component blueprint.

• Invoke speech event. The Actor Component has an interpreter for the speech marks driving animation.

Features:

• Adds aws speech mark asset type, to import Amazon Polly files. you may share your speech files.

• No AWS connection required during runtime.

• Character Stub and Animation Blueprint for MetaHuman (Creator), extended to handle 20 viseme curves configurations and breath SSML viseme.

• Editor Asset Utitility for creating subtitles from speech marks.

• Bring your own images, fonts or caption system.

• Paper 2D viseme flipbook support.

Code Modules:

•  HumanTalk (Runtime)

•  HumanTalkEditor (Editor)

Number of Blueprints: 6

Number of C++ Classes: 3

Network Replicated: No

Number of Audio Waves: 13 pregenerated short interjection samples, each in six voices, plus speechmarks

Supported Development Platforms: Win64

Supported Target Build Platforms: Win64

Documentation: Link

Example Project: Link (requires plugin)

Important/Additional Notes:

• You need an AWS account to generate high-quality speech files from text with Polly and download them. This product is not affiliated with Amazon. Amazon Web Services, AWS, the Powered by AWS logo and Amazon Polly are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

• You need the MetaHuman (Creator) to use the included character, animation and blueprint templates.

• Demo does not include fonts for Hindi and Arabic text.

• City Sample Crowds characters are no longer supported.