SGX Production Tools Overview

The SGX Production Tools suite is the workhorse of SGX, providing the abilty to produce high-quality, facial animation at scale, using audio files and transcripts as input. It ships with two executables: SGX Director and SGX Producer. Both run on Windows. See Requirements.

These tools work in conjunction with the SGX Studio plugins, which provide an interface to character rigs: the ability to set up characters to be driven by SGX, and the ability to preview and import animation on those character rigs.

See Producing Animation for an essential overview of audio-to-animation processing with SGX.

SGX Director

SGX Director is a graphical production tool. Users can batch process, preview animation, make changes and reprocess, all in one tool.

Its major features include:

• User-friendly batch processing launcher (which launches SGX Producer).

• Event editor, which supports the interactive workflow (see SGX Interactive Processing).

  • Visualization: Interactive audio-visual playback, including live-streaming of animation into SGX Studio (Maya or Unreal).

  • Editing: Editable metadata including word alignment, behavior modes, expressions, and various modifiers.

  • Reprocessing: Immediately reprocess to see the effects of edits on the animation

SGX Producer

SGX Producer is the core batch processing system. It can be accessed directly through a command-line interface, or launched via the SGX Director batch GUI.

Its major features include:

• Automation with consistent quality

• Optimized processing pipeline

• Batch behavior controls

• Batch reporting

• Support for reprocessing edited events

Installation

Follow these instructions to install SGX Producer and SGX Director:

1. Uninstall any version of SGX Production Tools prior to 4.1.0.

2. Download the latest version of SGX Production Tools.

3. Run SGX_ProductionTools-4.x.x_install.exe.

4. When prompted, supply the location of the license file (.lic).

5. When prompted, provide the installation destination. The default destination will be "C:\Program Files\Speech Graphics\SGX Production Tools". (Note this location requires running the installer as Adminstrator.)

Manual installation

After installing on one machine, the installation may be copied to other machines. As of SGX Production Tools 4.1.2, there are no longer any environment variables to set.

Installing langauges

Each language module is currently delivered as a .k file plus an auxiliary folder .k_:

When you receive your language modules, make sure they are unzipped, and place all of them (both .k files and auxiliary folders) into a single folder on your system: the Languages folder. (In SGX Director, provide the location of this folder in the Processing settings.) Below is an example of a Languages folder.