Animation and Video Life

I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996.

It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it.

But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs.

Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures, and Toon Hair, designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker.



The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that works as both a male or female pre teen), eleven hair style bases, with thirteen hair additions for further variation.

T…

Being an independent animator is not like a studio animation job. There's so much more to do that is indirectly related to the actual task of animating. Over the years I've sought out many apps, tools, and services that can help me achieve that one single task, expressing myself through animation.

Below is my Ultimate Independent Animator's Resource List for 2019. It started out as a list of free or low cost apps that could help you in every stage of producing either 2D or 3D animation, and then just kind of grew from there.

You may not have been looking for a Time Management App as much as you needed something to get you started in 3D animation but when those commissioned projects start coming in you'll have a head start on maximizing your time.

All the apps and services on this list had to meet two main criteria:

They had to be useful and relevant to an Indy Animator/artist.The base app/service had to be US$200.00 or less.
(In the case of a subscription service that&…

If you're the kind of 2D animator that needs to get high quality work out fast then you should be taking a serious look at Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 because that is the key feature that informs almost everything this application is capable of.

Formerly known as CrazyTalk Animator 3, the release of Cartoon Animator 4 (CA4) reveals an application that goes out of its way to make high end 2D puppet rig and motion graphic animations easier to create quickly, and as intuitively as possible.

That's not to say there isn't a learning curve but another great strength of CA4 is that you won't get lost in a sea of icons, tools, menus and more. The initial user interface is less complicated and more logically laid out than one may have used to put together a powerpoint presentation.

I love a really good avatar creation app because it feeds my narcissism (I mean somebody has to take an interest me, right?). So when I came across Oppa Doll for Android, a super cute Chibi avatar creation app I immediately went to work on creating my TET Avatar as a chibi character.

The creators of the app are not wrong when they say your character "will be the most adorable character in the world." I was so impressed by the quality of my finished character I was inspired to see how quickly I could turn it into an animated character using Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 3.

The fastest way to create a character in CTA3 is to put a Morph-based head onto a G3 character body rig (don't worry if you're not familiar with those terms they'll be defined as I go). For this article I decided to make a companion character to my TET Avatar, called Mia.

Previously I've shown you how to animate your artwork with Reallusion's CrazyTallk 8, an app designed to make the creation of talking head style animations easy and quick.

In this article I'm going to take the same Cow's Tail artwork and animate it with Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 3 (Pipeline Edition) just to show you the additional animation options that this application can bring to your production.

Note: At the time of writing Reallusion is weeks away from launching Cartoon Animator 4, the next iteration of CrazyTalk Animator which has been rebranded to better reflect its ambition as a complete 2D animation studio. Everything discussed in this article can be done in Cartoon Animator 4.

What is CrazyTalk Animator 3?CrazyTalk Animator 3 (CTA3) is designed to be a complete 2D animation composition studio. That is, you'll use external graphic editors like Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, or CC Animate to create your assets before bringing them into CTA3 to set…

Over the last couple of weeks I've been tinkering away at developing a new CrazyTalk Animator 3 character avatar for myself. You can see the finished character in the top image of this post.

The head is my original artwork, based upon a sketch I drew of myself back in 2016 and posted to my instagram.

The body is a CTA3, G2 Character body from Reallusion's G2 Body Composer Kit Volume One (except the shoes which are from Volume two).

What is interesting about the character is that the head is a hybrid, morph based head rather than a standard G2 character head.

The reason I chose a morph based head is almost entirely because they're much quicker to make than any other type in CTA3. You can literally make them using only one image. Though my hybrid uses five images that I actually created myself (six if you count the glasses which are actually a separate prop linked to the nose bone).

As well as that, a front facing morph based head has about the same range of turning motion …