Animation and Video Life

There is an ongoing debate in animation circles about what animation tools are considered 'Professional' and capable of producing 'Professional Quality' animation? Can only tools with the status of 'Industry Standard' be considered professional and by extension be the only tools that can produce professional quality animation?

Is it the target market of an animation tool that makes it professional? Is it the skill of the person using it that determines whether a tool is capable of professional quality output or the specs of the app?

What Animation Tool Should You Learn? In a discussion in the Cartoon Animator Users Facebook group a member noted that they had been learning Cartoon Animator (CA4) for four months, only to find out that the application isn't used by professional animators (based on asking 30 professionals on LinkedIn). The consensus was that learning Toon Boom Harmony or MOHO was the better option because both those applications have track rec…

Warwick Hays has built quite a sizeable collection of characters, props, and backgrounds for Cartoon Animator that I've yet to really explore, however, being the tragic skateboarder that I am, it was surely fate that I would buy his Skateboarder Ed G3 character as my first purchase.

Now I don't know a lot about Warwick but, based on the design of the skateboard prop that comes with Skateboarder Ed I'm fairly certain Warwick doesn't know much about skateboarding, and/or probably didn't use a good reference when designing his skateboard.

To be fair, Warwick's holding up a tradition of animators who clearly haven't seen a skateboard or noticed how skaters actually ride them. Just check out Bart Simpson's flat plank of wood with wheels from the opening intro of The Simpsons. Skateboards didn't even look like that in 1989 when the show first aired.

Bart also has a very unique riding style and is somehow able to get a lot of air time without popping the …

I never particularly planned a sequel to my animated short, Water Valet, but after purchasing some of Garry Pye's all new All Star G3 Characters for Cartoon Animator 4, I needed something to test them out.

As with Garry's Bendies Characters, the first thing I did was customize an All Star to look like my TET avatar. Once that happened I thought, why not do a second Water Valet animation? People seemed to like the first, and it's a great, short project, I can do in a weekend (you think I would've learned that it would take longer than a weekend from the first time).

It helps if you've seen part 1 but it's not essential. All you need to know is this office has a robot water cooler valet whose primary role is to push the one button on the water cooler that fills your cup with water. Watch part 2 below and then read the behind the scenes of how it was made.



Behind the Scenes Everything started with me creating my All Stars TET avatar, which is a mashup of All Star…

Three days before writing this post I had a light bulb moment for how to create my Batman parody character, Bat Storm, in iClone so that he would look almost exactly as I imagined him. There he is right in the main image of this post, in all his 3D toon character style glory.

Along the way I learned a few things about using Reallusion's Character Creator 3 for iClone 7.

Before I get into that I wanted to take a quick recap of the evolution of this character and how long it has taken to get here.

Note: If you're interested, Part 1 to this post is here. It's not required reading and the same article is linked to again later.

In the Beginning
Bat Storm started life in 2010 as a Batman parody on the then named GoAnimate (now Vyond). His design was based purely on what was available in GoAnimate's Comedy World Theme Character Designer.

In their designer there were male and female superhero outfits all featuring the double lightning bolt crest (which I believe represents '…

Reallusion released its first major update to Cartoon Animator 4 since its launch, adding improved integration with several leading graphics applications. Likely a direct response to criticisms that CA4 isn't as functional as some of its competitors due to a lack of drawing tools.

While you could already make your favorite graphics app with .PSD support the default editor that would launch whenever you exported an image from CA4 for editing, the 4.1 update takes this idea much further.

Once you've set up your preferred graphics app (Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Affinity Designer, Krita, or PhotoPea) it will have an icon tool on the main CA UI Toolbar (technically it's the 'Add-On toolbar' but you can position this on the main toolbar if you wish).

Now you can click on this directly whenever you want to just start drawing a new prop, scene or bone character from scratch. Once launched a link will be maintained between CA4 and your app, with whatever you're dra…

A common problem for hobbyist animators is finding people to voice characters. Friends are often called in to our no budget productions because they're friends and they're usually happy to help.

However friends aren't always available and/or willing, and hiring voice actors can be expensive if you're making a lot of short animations just for fun. In desperation you start voicing all your own characters but quickly realize your vocal range extends to only about three different voices.

This is where Voicemod may help.

Voicemod is a free dedicated, real time voice modifying app for Windows (other OS's are in the works). It has a very simple interface that makes it easy to alter the sound of your voice to any saved voice profile with a single click. It also makes it very easy to modify any profile or even create your own voice modifications from scratch.

Before I go further, while Voicemod is free you are limited to only a few voice profiles that randomly change daily…