Other Tales...

[Rodney]

My previous doodling topic was titled 'Tuckertown and other Stories' for reasons I believe I mention in that topic but...

 

Here I'm not so interested in Tuckertown as I am in other tales that might be told... or explored.

Recently I was doodling and came up with a character I just call 'Adventure Cat'.

This topic will try to focus on him and his world mostly to give my doodling in 2D and 3D a little focus.

 

At any rate, I thought I would try to create a vehicle I had drawn for Adventure Cat in 3D with the latest release of Animation:Master.

Here is the result:

 

[robcat2075]

That looks like a perilous journey has begun!

[itsjustme]

Looks like fun, Rodney!

[Rodney]

Thanks guys!

A long time ago I did this image:

 

But I really didn't have any plans for a driver at that time.

I even thought it might be more of a 'Cars' type setup where the vehicles were alive and didn't have drivers.

BUT...

Adventure Cat might be the perfect driver for that truck and more.

Time will tell.

 

I have no idea where the models are for that desert scene with the truck but it shouldn't be hard to remake if I cannot find it.

I recall thinking at the time that I needed to strive for simplicity in my designs and modeling.

 

[Rodney]

This isn't related to Adventure Cat but was drawn about the same timeframe.

I call her 'Feature Request Lady':

 

 

 

And yeah, she could probably appear in an Adventure Cat episode.  Why not?

The theme during this drawing was 'cats'... so, see if you can find the cat!

[fae_alba]

On 7/11/2021 at 11:17 PM, Rodney said:

This isn't related to Adventure Cat but was drawn about the same timeframe.

I call her 'Feature Request Lady':

 

 

 

And yeah, she could probably appear in an Adventure Cat episode.  Why not?

The theme during this drawing was 'cats'... so, see if you can find the cat!

I see him...doing exactly what cats do... Sitting and watching us humans do strange things for their amusement.

[Rodney]

In other tales...

I'm doing some R&D with Techsmith Audiate on some old Animation:Master tutorials. 

Automated transcription from audio to text... then editing the text in order to automatically edit the audio.

 

[Wildsided]

The software can change the audio by changing words in the transcript? 

Is it a computer voice like Microsoft Sam or does it modify real spoken audio? 

Or am I reading this wrong. 

[Rodney]

Audiate is something of a one trick pony in that it basically just syncs audio/voice with text and allows one to modify the other.

How it converts the audio to text (i.e. transcription) is it uploads the audio to IBM Watson which then transcribes the audio file into text based on what it is in its dictionary.

If we look into the .audiate file (which is text) each word segment is given a confidence level (on how accurate the transcription is assessed to be.

 

Put in another way...

Initially there is only the audio file.

Audiate transcribes that audio file into text and keeps it in sync within the UI so that as the user edits the text (mostly deletions) the audio automatically adjusts.

The user can do various things like Right Click and assign custom words to the audio segments... or silence the segment.

 

I haven't done much with copy/pasting of words in the audio to have the voice actually say new/different things but that works as well.

So in such a case we might have said something inaccurate and later used the correct word.   

We could copy paste the correct word into place and press on.

 

Finally, and this something I queried the folks at Techsmith about... the textual track can be exported as an SRT (or text) document.

In my estimation it would be good to be able to bring SRT files into the program in order to iterate and improve the audio further.

But... that isn't the primary purpose of the software.

 

I would say that ideally, the user records their voice directly into Audiate... repairing badly spoken words/sentences on the fly.

Once the audio is transcribed into text the user would then remove the bad reading by deleting the text which in turn would update the audio.

We cannot type in a new word that isn't in the audio and have that suddenly appear in the audio.

I imagine they could probably add a feature that would do a textual search for that word in the current audio and make it available for insertion.

 

Audiate doesn't read the text... it just plays back the audio it has.

My assumption is that under the hood they have a file with pointers to various parts of the audio.

When playing back it follows the pointers and when exporting it uses those pointers to create the modified wav/mp3 file.

 

The pricing is rather prohibitive for the program... but they do have a trial for those that wish to give Audiate a try.

 

My hope is that they incorporate Audiate into Camtasia but I think they want to pay a bit more for their R&D before moving in that direction.

[Rodney]

Woah.  Adventure cat has been missing in action.

Rumor is he's been out doing R&D...

 

Until we an find out more, here's a 2D/3D ruff rig thingy: