Animating Office People with Crazy Talk Animator (Part1)

A few months back I purchased Crazy Talk Animator Pro and have been trying to learn it ever since. It's not that it's a hard program to learn particularly, there's just so much to take in. It's definitely not like GoAnimate where you can be up and running in minutes.

Let's back up a little shall we. If you're not familiar with Crazy Talk Animator it's essentially a 2D animation studio that lets you create character 'puppets' which you can animate on any scene you can create.

The style of animation falls somewhere between cut outs and traditional animation because you can make puppets from existing photos of people, animals or objects or you can draw your own puppets completely from scratch.

As an animation studio it clearly has professional application but it's also great for the hobbyist and anyone who wants to animate but drawing isn't their strong point. It even has a whole market place of pre-made characters and sets which you can buy from or contribute your own art to (and earn money from them).

After several months of not really producing anything other than a really rough Robocop test animation (below), Reallusion (the company that makes Crazy Talk Animator), were offering their video tutorial package for the software at a discounted price. So I decided to buy it.

Most of the video tutorials are actually available, free, on the software's Youtube Tutorial Channel however I can't tell you how handy it is to have them all in one place with an easy to navigate menu when you're not online.

I think they're giving me a much better understanding of the software and what it can do. Enough for me to be a little confident in starting my first actual project featuring my own hand drawn characters.

One of my intentions is to use Crazy Talk Animator to offer business an animation service to demonstrate their products. Similar to what I'm already offering with GoAnimate but with the ability to make characters completely from scratch - and even from photos of people in the business (for something a little different). It'll be kind of a premium service just above what I can do with GoAnimate.

To that end I've decided to create a cast of my own office people who may or may not star in my business animations for clients. At the very least they will form the basis of my show reel demonstration video for promoting the service.

I'm going to be producing a series of my Studio Diary videos following my progress, the first of which is embeded below. In this video you see me create the initial characters based on some drawings I did years earlier.

The next step will be to turn them into vector drawings using Serif DrawPlus X5. Followed by importing them into Crazy Talk Animator. Which I'll do in a future post.

Comments

Animating Warwick Hays Skateboarder Ed Character for Cartoon Animator - Can Ed Kickflip?

Skateboarder Ed. Character by Warwick Hays. 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. Bart's skateboard has changed over the years, though curiously, even later versions, barely get closer to what an actual skateboard looks like. 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 int

Real Human AI Text to Speech Voice App by Replica Studios - AI voice actors for games + films

Replica Studios TTS App. Image: Replica Studios It really pays to attend Reallusion's free animation demonstration Webinars. At a recent webinar, host, Kai DeNeve, featured Replica Studio's A.I. Voice Actor system . Replica uses Artificial Intelligence to learn a real voice actor's speech patterns, tone, and inflection, which can then be used with their Text To Speech (TTS) system to produce the most realistic computer generated voices yet (or at least that I've come across). You can even fine tune how individual words are said and more. Their TTS system works through a downloadable desktop app for Mac and Windows. There are also bridging apps if you want to use their system for voices in UnReal and Unity Gaming systems. Sign up for a free account and get 30 minutes of free voice downloads (that's 30 minutes of recorded audio - not 30 minutes to download audio - that you can download a line at a time). After that you can purchase 4 hour blocks for just USD$24.00.

My First Anthropomorphic Character with Reallusion's Character Creator 3 (Pipeline) & Reviving My TETAnimations YouTube Channel

Skateboarding Cage Monster - Heelflip. Reallusion's Character Creator 3 is a pretty incredible application for creating any kind of human digital 3D character quickly. Its power comes from the way it can totally deform a standard human base template character into a seemingly infinite number of body types and shapes. While I wouldn't recommended it as a your only 3D character sculpting tool, it is very powerful with just how much you can edit a character's form at the vertex/mesh level. I've experimented a little with CC3's Edit mesh functions, mostly using it to hide areas of an object I don't want seen. Bat Storm's cape is a good example where I used the ability to hide vertices to completely remove the assassin's hood from the neckline up. Just on a whim I wondered if I could create my Cage Monster character entirely in CC3 (with exception to his skin textures which I edited in Krita). The character is basically a stylised human body with a monster

#XPPenanimationchallenge - How I Created My Entry for XP-Pen's First Animation Competition

XP-Pen's Mascot, Fenix, in A Change of Art by TET. XP-Pen , the makers of a range of pretty sweet pen display monitors, and Reallusion , the makers of some pretty sweet animation apps, teamed up for XP-Pen's very first Animation Challenge with the theme of 'Change'. Any form of animation was acceptable with entries needing to be a minimum of ten seconds in length. Entries closed on June 16th, 2020 (sorry, this blog isn't really a breaking news site, I probably should've mentioned it back in March when entries submissions opened) so it's too late to enter, but I wanted to tell you the tale of how I ended up creating my entry in a really late evening, the day before the deadline. Watch my entry below. Remember the theme is 'Change' and XP-Pen suggested in the rules that including their mascot, Fenix, somewhere in the animation would be looked upon favorably. The Ideas Scenes from Skater - My First XP-Pen Competition Idea. This was not my first idea

Stylish Stick Figures for Cartoon Animator 4.2 - New Characters by TET

Stylish Stick Figures by TET. Animating stick figures is almost a right of passage for any animator who has ever made an old fashioned flipbook or discovered the free stickman animator app, Pivot Animator . There's also the hugely popular viral stick figure animation, Animator Versus Animation and its sequels by Alan Becker that continue to inspire variations more than 12 years later. Back when Vyond was GoAnimate they had a stick figure theme that was popular site wide despite having many other themes with much more refined Saturday morning cartoon style characters. I even had my own stick figure series, Harry Chalk , on GoAnimate. Long story short, I was looking through the Reallusion Cartoon Animator Marketplace and discovered there really weren't any well designed, traditional looking stick figure characters. That's not to say there weren't any at all but I wanted something similar to GoAnimate's stick figures which included full facial features and male and

Your First Look at Bat Storm Animated and Launching My Patreon

Bat Storm. Traditionally my Bat Storm character has always been a parody of whichever movie Batman is in the limelight. Back in the GoAnimate days that was Christian Bale, but now we have a new, upcoming Batman with Robert Pattinson. What better way to greet the new guy than with Bat Storm's own 'camera test' teaser just like Robert Pattinson's suit camera test. This is actually the very first public release of my new Bat Storm character model animated. Prior to this it's only been 'leaked' still images (does it count as leaking when it's the show creator deliberately posting images publically?). Anyhow Bat Storm pays homage to two Batmen ahead of their time (Val Kilmer and George Clooney) who had the balls to wear nipples on the Batsuit. Clearly a diversionary measure designed to disarm unsuspecting bad guys with laughter. If no one is taking you seriously that's clearly an advantage! Visit my Patreon Page for more information. L

After Effects for the Rest of Us - Reallusion Release Cartoon Animator 4.3 with Game Changing Export Modes

Now you can add 'After Effects' to your Cartoon Animator 4.3 projects in any video application. This blur and halftone effect was applied in Shotcut Video Editor. Reallusion released Cartoon Animator Update 4.3 with much fanfare about its new Adobe After Effects plugin which is a game changer all on its own. The ability to export a CA4 project with its layers intact into AE for additional video compositing should be a head turner for industry pros looking to take advantage of some of CA4's more unique features and reduced workflows. For those of us not in the Adobe ecosystem (and there are a lot of you out there) Reallusion did not leave you without something to get excited about. Also in the 4.3 update is the ability to export your project as an Object Based Sequence . Essentially this exports each element of your project to its own folder, audio included. If an object has any animation on it at all it will be exported as sequentially numbered, transparent PNG files. Thi

Animation and Video Life

Search This Blog