How to present a video as a 2D avatar instead of on camera
Send Vizard Agent your sprite sheet, a sample of your voice and the footage you want covered. It clones the voice for the narration, locates each pose on the sheet by its silhouette, re-crops them cleanly, and switches expressions in time with what is being said.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say what you are and hand over the three things. The word for this format carries a lot of implicit specification, such as where the host sits and that the poses switch rather than animate, so using it saves you explaining the layout from scratch. What it leaves unsaid, Vizard Agent proposes and you correct, which is faster than specifying it blind.
I am a PNGtuber. Here is my voice to clone, my sprites, and the clips I want used. Make a video about this topic.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It gets the sprites right before it builds anything, because a badly cropped host is visible in every frame. Poses on a sheet are located by their visible silhouette rather than by an even grid, then re-cropped tight so no neighbouring pose bleeds into the frame. In the session behind this article it:
- Researched the topic against primary documentation so the script was accurate rather than plausible.
- Cloned the narration voice from the supplied sample, generated a background cue, and split the narration into two sections to stay inside the voice engine's length limit.
- Prepared the expressions and the transcript timing together, so the switches landed on the words.
- Inspected each extracted pose (neutral, surprised, closing) individually rather than trusting the extraction, and re-cropped clean versions by silhouette when the first pass was loose.
- Tightened the host silhouettes and rebuilt the video.
- Moved the captions, because the source clips already had text burnt into them.
When does this not work well?
When the sprite sheet is tightly packed. Poses drawn touching each other cannot be separated cleanly by silhouette, and the crops will either clip the character or include a neighbour. Individual files solve it completely. It also does not do real lip sync, since Vizard Agent switches poses, and a noisy voice sample clones the noise along with the voice.
Common questions
Do I need separate pose files? No, Vizard Agent works from a sheet. Separate files crop more reliably, though.
How much voice do you need? About a minute of clean speech. Vizard Agent will say if the sample is too noisy.
Can it do mouth movement? Not per phoneme. Vizard Agent switches poses rather than animating lips.