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My Character Design Process for Puppet, Bone Rig 2D Animation in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator (Part 1) - Initial Design

D esigning original characters for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is a relatively easy process because, for the most part, you only really need one final, front facing image of your character design in a T-pose. Using that pose as a base, you can build out a turn-able head (with perhaps a few additional sprites depending upon your needs), and a three quarter facing body, which is enough to allow the character to walk across the stage without looking weird. In what will be a series of posts, I thought you may find it interesting to go behind the scenes as I design and rig a character for Cartoon Animator from the very beginning stage to a fully rigged G3-SVG character. Choosing a Design The character I'm creating is a bikini clad, blonde haired, woman, not just for the sake of drawing a scantily clad woman. Cartoon Animator's new Color Management tools allows you to create clothing systems for your characters where items can be added or removed just by changing color opacity.
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AE Juice - Animation Presets, Motion Graphics, Templates, Transitions for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Other Video Applications

Level up you video edits and animations with AE Juice's motion graphics and templates. Some days you just don't have the time to create flashy motion graphics for your latest video or animation. For some of us it's more a question of our own artistic abilities being a little less than the awesome we'd like them to be. Whatever reason a resource like AE Juice's animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for After Effects , Premiere Pro , and other video applications can really make your work stand out very quickly. AE Juice gives you access to an instant library of free, premade content elements and sound effects, which you can add to with additional purchases of various themed packs from their store. There are three ways to manage their content, all of which can be used in commercial projects . The AE Juice Standalone Package Manager makes it easy to browse previews of all your pack contents and to download and find just the elements yo
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Can You Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 for Free Using Their 137 Official YouTube Video Tutorials Sorted Into a Logical Learning Order?

Or you could just buy The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator . While Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is one of the easiest 2D animation studios to get up and running with quickly, learning it from all of the official, free, video tutorials can be more overwhelming than helpful. With more than 137 videos totaling more than 28 and a half hours of tutorials, spread across three generations of the software (Cartoon Animator 3 through 5) it's hard to know if what you're learning is a current or legacy feature that you either need to know or can be skipped. Many of the official tutorials only teach specific features of the software and don't relate at all to previous or later tutorials. As a result there are many features either not mentioned or are hard to find. To make your learning easier, on this page, I've collected together all of the essential, official, free video tutorials and sorted them into a learning order that makes sense. Simply start at
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Cartoon Animator 5's Spring Bones and Moho's Dynamic Bones + Wind Compared

Moho Dynamic Bones (left) versus Cartoon Animator Spring Bones (right). It seems fair to say that Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 's main competitor is Lost Marble's Moho Pro . While Moho has generally been ahead on advanced animation features, Cartoon Animator has been closing the gap with each new version. Personally I have licenses for both applications - just recently upgrading my Moho 12 license to 13 because I think there are times when the apps could complement each other in my workflow. With that in mind, I'm well positioned to make comparisons between each application's feature set.  Since Reallusion introduced Spring Bones in CA5 I thought you may be interested to see Moho's equivalent, Dynamic Bones (or vice-versa if Moho is your preferred software). Cartoon Animator 5's Spring Bones Right now almost everyone in the Cartoon Animator community, who have tried the new Spring Bones, are singing their praises - with good reason. Previously, if we wa
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