So, i'v decided to start dabbling in more modding. I put it off for awhile since i'm not hugely creative when it come's to doing stuff like, making huge quest lines and whatnot. So now i'm thinking of just getting into some basic mod work, like scripting, making companions, etc. Now to me nothing is more lame than having custom NPC's who don't say a god damned thing... AT ALL. All they do is show text. Now obviously, there are workarounds, like using other NPC's in-game dialog for them, or adding your own. Now what i am wondering is, how to go about making the dialog and mouth movements sync up? Since I haven't started this yet, i'm not sure if I need to do such a thing or what doing it entails. I just want to know if it's going to require some heavy duty work of if it's something G.E.C.K can easily help me handle.

It can be troublesome depending on your expertise.

I thought there was a tutorial somewhere but I can't seem to find it.

It requires installing Oblivion's version of the GECK, and moving and renaming your voice lines (in .wav format at that point) so that Oblivion's editor is willing to see them and use its .lip file generator. Then you move your .wav file and the newly-created .lip files back into your FO3 dir, and name them properly, to test it. When done, you should move the .wav files to .ogg and package it into a .bsa file using FO3Archive (the .bsa creator that comes with FOMM doesn't work out for voiced lines for some reason).

That's a description of how it is done, but it's not specific enough to get you started if you are new at it. Not sure it's worth your time at the moment (or, is it)?

Thanks actually just the information I needed, even if a little vague . It just, atleast lets me know, that it doesn't require modeling or any crazy scripting to make it work. It just requires as you said, a tutorial and some practice. I figure, for now, I can work on my mods, and turn to the community for help. Maybe someone who can do it wouldn't mind helping with that kind of thing. Doesn't seem like it would take absurdly long.

It can be a lot of work. You get the lines from the voice actor, and for each line, you have to chop out the silence spots which will be before the line and probably some of the silence after, and you can expect to run a "normalize" filter against each line in your sound editor (such as Audacity) so that the line comes into the game at the correct volume. Only then do you get to make the .lip file, and then since you have already created the line itself in the GECK (hopefully), you figure out from the GECK what the correct filename would be. Then you name it all properly, and move the line into the right subdirectory in your DATA directory. Then when you close out of the line in the GECK and re-open it, you can kinda see if it found the .wav and the .lip file.

Starting with the lines as they come from the voice actor, a fully voiced character is hours-or-days of work for the person who is putting the voice into the game, and that's once the person is good at the process and moving along steadily.

I sure hope Bethesda themselves has a better way to do this than we do, because thinking about all of the time it would have taken to do Jericho, or Moira, using this process... owch. Employee burnout, anyone??

I have to say that for me there's nothing more irritating and distracting than bad voice acting; I'll take subtitles over that any day. So that's another problem to add to the long list above - finding people with the talent to do voices properly. It's not something that just anyone off the street can do well.

None of the work required is difficult to do but it can be time consuming. I did 50 some lines last night that I took from the recorded state through lipsyncing and putting it back into my mod and it took me about two hours I think. I've been doing it for awhile and am pretty fast. It's the most tediously boring task I do. But, if you aren't going to be doing too much dialogue it's not so bad. And, if you decide to use the dialouge out of the game it can be much easier. I have a couple of tutorials that I can recommend.

1. Although this one isn't about voice syncing specifically, I don't know how much modding you've done, and it's a tutorial that shows how to make a http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4800, but in those steps it shows you how to get a voice file into the GECK and that is needed to get any voice file into the GECK and can be applied to voice files for dialogue.

2. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11802explains about the Oblivion Construction Set and what you need to do to use it to make the lip files.

I'd highly recommend that you do it. It's so fun to have your characters say what you want them to. It may take forever to do it and be tedious but the reward is worth it, I think. I've done a fair amount of work reusing and cutting/splicing existing voice files from the game as well, and that is rewarding as well as it requires a different kind of creativity to make dialogue from lines/and bits of lines you are given. Kind of like dialogue Scrabble or something.

:) llama