Animation and Video Life

Animaker's bold claim, right on its homepage is that it's 10X Better than other Online Animation Video Making software (#DIY). Also featured on their homepage is a cool promotional video that's dynamic, full of charming lip synced characters, with high quality animation that matches perfectly to the story being told.

If I could make anything even half as good with their studio, I'll at least buy that they're better than most of their competitors. Let's see if they live up to their tagline 'Animated Videos, Done Right!'

Animaker is a flash based, cloud animation studio application that gives you access to an entire library of thousands of characters, props, backgrounds, sounds and more, to create almost any kind of 2D animated video. In fact they make the bold claim that theirs is the largest animated library in the world of any similar online application (it's not... or if it actually is, it's not as versatile as other comparable libraries) .

P…

If you're the kind of artist who likes to create characters, specifically focusing on faces, and you would like to see your creations come alive through animation, Reallusion's CrazyTalk 8 application provides an easy to learn solution.

What is CrazyTalk 8?
CrazyTalk 8 (not to be confused with Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 3) is designed specifically to create 'talking head' style animation.

Impressively it can be used to animate both 2D and 3D based characters. The 2D heads it creates are actually semi 3D 'relief map' style heads that have some ability to move up, down, and side to side. The full 3D heads it creates are properly formed heads but they still have a limited turning range (you can't turn them more than about 45 degrees in any direction).

For the purpose of this tutorial I'll be focussing on my 2D painting of a cow, that I created back in 2003, with no intention of ever animating it, or turning it into a 2D animated scene.

I'll b…

Around the beginning of December 2018 I started work on a new CrazyTalk Animator 3, G3 character of my own original design. Known as 'The Cage Monster' readers of my TET Life blog may recognize him as the Skatepark mascot for the long since closed Cage Skatepark.

I didn't document the creation process in this blog, as I've done with other characters in the past, as I didn't want to start yet another series on a new character that I may or may not complete.

At this stage I have completed a full G3 'side' view character rig which I managed to finish faster than usual because I could simply copy and paste all the hands and facial features from my G3 color monkey characters (that this character was derived from and which you can purchase in my Reallusion Marketplace store).

The Cage Monster will become available in my store when I've completed a front view character rig and his fully animated skateboard prop. The skateboard will feature multiple angle spri…

I first reviewed video creation site Renderforest back in November of 2017. Since then they have been adding more and more content packs/tools to their cloud based video creation studio, branching into animated explainer video territory in the process (as well as logo and website design too).

This review is focussed on their 3D Explainer Toolkit, but keep in mind, along with several different animated toolkits (including whiteboard), Renderforest has toolkit/templates to suit almost any video need from logo stings and music visualizations, through to complete video templates that can be highly customized with your own content. Click here to browse their template library.

I am planning to review some of their other animated toolkits in the future but their 3D Explainer Toolkit particularly caught my eye because few (if any?) similar cloud animation services offer 3D animated styles.

Renderforest's editing studio revolves entirely around mixing and matching pre-animated scene templ…

The Dork Knight was one of the very first animations I created in 2008 on the then very new GoAnimate (now known as Vyond) website and animation studio. At the time it was featured as a Staff Pick and spawned two 'sequel' animated shorts.

A very loose parody of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dork Knight reimagines Bruce Wayne as a preteen nerd who thinks he can be a superhero. This version of the character is rich enough to have a butler (Alfred) but lives a more suburban lifestyle with his 'Batcave' being his mother's garage.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, over the years I've bought probably thousands of dollars of CrazyTalk Animator content packs that I've barely used. I really want to do more animation that doesn't take months to complete and is just made for the fun of telling a story.

Remaking my old GoAnimation shorts is something for years I thought would be a fun challenge so I finally decided to give it a shot. Rather than use…

Reallusion recently announced the next iteration of their 2D Animation studio, CrazyTalk Animator 3, by unveiling a new name and a work in progress page on their website showcasing some of the new features.

Now known as Cartoon Animator 4, the new name signifies that CrazyTalk Animator has grown far beyond giving bodies to the morph based heads in CrazyTalk and evolved into, as their tagline states, the one-for-all 2D animation software.

CrazyTalk Animator 3 was such a leap forward, and has had so many new features added through periodical updates, that you might wonder if there was anything left to implement that would wow users. But Reallusion has managed to do just that.

Some of the features revealed, which are explained in more detail, with video, on their WIP 1 page, include:
Motion EnhancementAuto IK RigSmart IK SystemMotion RetargetingCustom UI Rig Smooth Head Turn360 Degree Head TurnG4 360 Head CreatorAnimal or Human Live PerformanceWebcam Facial MocapReal-time Lip SyncUpper B…