xVAsynth voice generation, Let's swap tips! Options

[Lena Wolf]

Let's have a whole new thread about voice generation with xVAsynth! This is for all the different games that it supports. There are differences of course, but I think there are more similarities and hopefully we can help each other.

I'll start - this is for Oblivion, a reprint of my post in Wolf Mods thread.

I had another go at voice generation in batch mode, and I now have a better idea of what's going on. I wrote it up here, if anyone is interested.

It's a huge pain at the moment to export quest dialogue. There is an xEdit script for Skyrim but not for Oblivion, and Skyrim quest records are too different - voice types are independent from race in Skyrim. I looked at that script... complicated. I know it's "only" a Pascal program, but it's yet another API to learn... mmm... Does anyone have a similar script for Oblivion?

[Lena Wolf]

I spent two days straight up generating voice lines for TWMP Northern Realms - my nickname for the conglomerate of TWMP Hammerfell, High Rock (empty as it is), Skyrim, Stirk and Chain Islands. This covers the following mods:

- TWMP Hammerfell
- TWMP High Rock (nothing there yet, but let's not leave it out)
- TWMP Skyrim Improved
- TWMP Locations
- TWMP Skyrim Alive

Yesterday the whole day (!) was spent exporting dialogue from these mods. It should be possible to do it faster, but I couldn't find another way, meaning that I was sitting here at my PC all day clicking the "Export dialogue" button on per quest basis. Each quest took anywhere between 1 minute and 10 minutes to generate. Not fast enough to keep my attention, yet not long enough to be able to focus on something else in between... Infuriating.

Once that was done, the files had to be converted into the input format that xVAsynth expects and voice IDs had to be filled in for each line. That's 21,895 lines, thank you very much.

So this morning was spent cleaning the data. Nords and Orcs for example speak with the same voice, so once you convert the race+sex combo into a voice ID, you find a lot of duplicate lines. Delete them because the Synth is not smart enough to preprocess your data for you. Still, I was left with 5,697 lines.

Tried loading that into the Synth, it would start synthesizing, but after some 200-300 lines it would crash. Not even making a dent in it. Turns out, the default settings seem to be meant for a high-end PC, or may be just a modern PC, not a 12 year old thing like mine. Turned down the settings and enabled GPU and VRAM usage - that helped enormously. Still, I found it necessary to split up the big file per voice - trouble seems to start when the Synth tries to do the smart thing and group the data... Don't.

After that it didn't take too long to generate all files, but still it was all afternoon babysitting it. Again, can't get away and can't really focus on anything else.

The next step was lip sync generation. This is done with the CS (or at least I don't know another way to do it). Fortunately, Vorians took the heat on that topic and ShadeMe even made some changes in the CSE especially for that - which I also hijacked. With the latest development build, lip sync file generation can actually be done in batch mode from the Character menu, and it works! Another couple of hours and you've got it. How many hours is it already altogether? Too many.