Animation and Video Life

Work on my Skate Monkey character for Crazy Talk Animator 2 continues and I'm happy to say it's nearly done. If you haven't read my previous posts follow these links, Part 1 , Part 2 . Below is a very short video demonstration of the character so far pulling a few dance moves. There's a few minor issues that you may or may not notice but otherwise I'm quite happy with the character's general look and how the body is working. Obviously I've still to add a tail to my monkey. I'm not quite sure how best to do this yet. CTA2 characters do have provisions for a tail with multiple sections but it seems like a hold over from CTA1's G1 characters and don't work so well with CTA2's G2 mutlti-dimensional characters. Other things still to do is all the facial expression graphics and hand graphics (for different hand positions and motions). I've also developed the monkey as a character capable of utilizing the new character styles feature

Last post I started creating my Skate Monkey, Multi-dimensional character for Crazy Talk Animator 2. This post I thought I'd give you an update on where I'm at. It's been a slow process and there is still much to be done. Below you can see my DrawPlus character template now has all ten views of my skate monkey completed. Well almost. DrawPlus Template with 10 views of my skate monkey. If you click on the above image to see the larger view you'll notice all the character views appear to have random purple dots spread all over them. These are the pivot points (or joins) for where each body part will attach to the next. So far I've only positioned them for the very first view. I mentioned in my last post that I didn't really like drawing in DrawPlus, which is part of the reason this character has developed so slowly. I've been completing 1-2 views per day, on the days I have sat down to work on the character. After that I've usually felt so ti

Continuing on with my progress of  learning Crazy Talk Animator 2 I've begun work on creating my first Multi-Dimensional character. As you may have guessed it's my Skate Monkey character that I briefly attempted to turn into a CTA1 character quite some time back (See this post for the video ). A CTA2 'Multi-Dimensional' character is simply a character that consists of 10 different view angles that form a 360 degree view. This character is attached to a bone skeleton that exists in three dimensional space. The software then calculates which images from your 10 different view angles are needed to execute whatever motion you add. In the image below you can see my skate monkey character drawn at angle zero in the Serif DrawPlus template provided by Reallusion. The other nine view angles are the CTA2 dummy character which I will progressively replace with my monkey as I draw more views. A CTA2 Multi-Dimensional character has 10 view angles. In the short video be

The Cast of New Look . New Look is a new animated short that I created from a piece of comedy I wrote back in December of 1996. It's a very short sketch I created with a view to it being told as stand up comedy but I thought it was also an ideal piece to help me learn Crazy Talk Animator 2  (CTA2). Watch the short video below then I'll go through some of the behind the scenes stuff to give you some idea of how it was made. Note that all of the artwork comes from CTA2   G2 Power Tools Volume 1 and that my goal was not to make a perfectly animated short. I know there's plenty of room to improve. This was entirely about learning the basics of the software. The Script As mentioned it was written by me in 1996 and is inspired by real life events where I actually did start a new job as a layout artist for a very big Supermarket Group. On several occasions different people did come up to me and say "You look a little lost!" I wasn't but I must have pau