Model Preview showing garbage - trying singing faces images

[jamills706]

Where can I take a look at the dictionary?
Is that a "wise" thing for me to do - or will I screw things up for future updates to the software?

I tried moving a phoneme over but they seem "stuck" to each other --- like when I scoot one over the next one follows it and doesn't leave any space.

[Gilrock]

I won't be at home in time to help today.  My guess is we install the standard_dictionary where the main xlights exe is installed.  You can create a user_dictionary file in the show directory that will take precedence.  Look at the standard one to figure out the format.  The phoneme's you get come from a Carnegie Melon database so that's what all the smart people have decided is the best way to represent the mouth motions.  There are actually 43 phoneme's but we only use 10 so several of them get routed into the same bucket.  You probably need to change to a 25ms sequence if you created a 50ms sequence and that might give you better motion.

[jamills706]

Thanks, I'll give that a try!

[Gilrock]

By the way the user_dictionary only needs to contain the words you want to override.

[kevinp]

Sean posted this video on Papagayo today.  I haven't watched it all yet, but there might be some information in there that might be of some help.

https://vimeo.com/163497160

[jamills706]

That was interesting - not sure it was a lot of new information about "my problem" - but I did see several things to make my job easier! Thanks for that!

So - now, this morning I remade all of my faces/phoneme image (this time as .png instead of .jpg since I noticed that was the default image type that the program looked for) making them smaller, so there wouldn't be as much distortion of the original image when it was reduced to the 24X50 matrix. Sounds simple enough, right? So I went to the Matrix setup and changed the file definitions to point to the new images. And, now nothing shows up again! I am so frustrated! LOL
I am good with computers. I've worked in the computer field all of my life - as a programmer and software engineer - and never have trouble picking up new software. So I find needing to ask for help quite upsetting!!! But... a simple change like this doesn't seem to me like it should have caused it to stop working again.
I even changed the images back to their old files in the setup and they don't work now either.
I went back through all of our messages from yesterday and verified that all the settings for the channels, etc. were as we discussed.

Any suggestions?

[Gilrock]

Gotta ask...did you hit Save to force it to re-render the new images?

[jamills706]

Sure did - several times - also hit the Green Gear-Render button after each time I hit Save.

[jamills706]

Wonder if it will tell you anything...
I just noticed that in the "Effect Assist" window there is a completely light blue rectangle with a big red "X" through the whole thing. Cant' say as I've noticed that there before --- but with so much going on I'm not sure I even looked at that.

[Phrog30]

The red x means the effect assist will not work for the selected effect. That is normal.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

[Gilrock]

Just double-check the entire process.

1)  Inspect the model and see if the face definition has the images listed for each phoneme and it points to a good path.
2)  Click on the Faces effect and see if it calls out that face definition and see if it calls out the proper timing track.

[jnealand]

I am good with computers. I've worked in the computer field all of my life - as a programmer and software engineer - and never have trouble picking up new software. So I find needing to ask for help quite upsetting!!!

Man, can I relate to that.  LOL

[jamills706]

OK - found the trouble - for some reason there were two versions of the face model view. Not sure how the second one came into existence other than to say that when it didn't work after adding the new images I deleted the old one and made a new one with the same name and added the phoneme images to it. Somehow the pulldown listing still contained both of them and the old one was still selected. Once I changed to the new one, the images now show and animate.

Thanks again for all of your great help!