Reddy, Super Bluey, and The Great Greensbury. I've got an idea...

One of my biggest stumbling blocks in moving forward with my own animation has been coming up with ideas that I can get excited about.

Even with using time saving animation software like CrazyTalk Animator 3 creating animated shorts is still a lot of work that you need to stay motivated for. As much as I want to earn a living from creating my own animated shorts, the higher priority is to enjoy creating them... you know, if you enjoy what you're doing you'll never work a day in your life - that kind of thing.

When I got back into creating animated shorts in 2008, after discovering GoAnimate, I was clearly having a lot of fun in the years before that site transitioned from allowing anyone to create animated stories to a business explainer video creation tool. I made somewhere around 180 animated shorts over the space of about 4 years - roughly 3 animations per month.

Most of my animations were either humorous shorts, sketch comedy, or sitcom like stories told in parts over several animated shorts. You can read about almost every one of them in this blog if you select the tag GoAnimate (those animations were part of the origin of this blog).

Rashy's plans for world
domination hit a snag.

One of the things I enjoyed most about creating those animations was carrying over characters from one story into the next, creating my own little TET animated universe.

That all started when I took Paul Dini's sock monkey characters, Super Rica and Rashy (licensed by GoAnimate at the time), and re-imagined Rashy as power hungry megalomaniac with visions of becoming 'The Boss of Everything'.

If you watch the first four animations in the playlist below you can see the evolution of Rashy, from the original stand alone short, through to him becoming a super villain when I mixed him with Underdog's world (another set of characters licensed by GoAnimate at the time). Note these animations are from 2008-2009 when dialogue was mostly done with speech balloons rather than voice actors on GoAnimate.

MIB with Obama and AKON.

From there Rashy went on to appear in my Men in Black parody staring AKON and Barack Obama as two MIB agents. As well as it's epic sequel MIB II.

All of these shorts had some of my best comedy writing and probably would have continued if GoAnimate hadn't decided to not renew the various licenses on the characters you could animate.

To Cut a Long Story Short...

Recently it occurred to me that I've had my own monkey characters, that I designed way back in the early 1990's. Lately I've taken to calling them 'color monkeys' because they're all the same kind of monkey but they can be either red, green, or blue.

The Great Greensbury, Super Bluey,
Kev, and Reddy.

I could easily reboot the fun I had with Super Rica and Rashy but with my own original characters.

So I did a slight redesign of my monkeys feet - because their original, impossibly big, human like, feet make them difficult to animate - and gave each one a name, kind of inspired by Paul Dini's characters; Reddy, Super Bluey, and the Great Greensbury (guess which name goes to which color of monkey).

I like the idea of them being owned by a Hollywood script writer, so rather than create someone kind of like Paul Dini's 'Dad' character I thought, why not just use Paul Dini's friend, writer/director, Kevin Smith as a base? I'm a huge fan of Kevin so why not?

Just to be clear, although the character's look and occupation is based on Kevin Smith, it's not actually meant to be Kevin Smith. Over time his personality will develop. I just don't see the point in trying to design a totally original character when creating a Kevin Smith like analogue will give me a base to build upon into something that's my own.

From these four characters I could easily build a world of my own characters (I have so many I've designed over the years) that I feel audiences would enjoy as much as the GoAnimate community enjoyed my work there (at the time I was one of the highest viewed GoAnimators on GoAnimate).

Transferring some of the ideas from those past animations into fresh new takes and stories really does sound fun to me. I feel, with this idea, I'm in a good place moving forward.

Using Avatar Maker with Cartoon Animator - Free Vector Cartoon Avatar Creator with Four Art Styles

I'm always on the lookout for cartoon avatar makers of any kind, whether it be ones that 'cartoonify' your photo, or ones that let you build a cartoon likeness from a library of individual features. Free Avatar Maker falls into the latter category and can be used for making head and shoulder cartoon avatars. While it doesn't have an extensive library of character features (you may struggle to get a good likeness), uniquely it will make your avatar in four different art styles concurrently, allowing you to save the one you like most, or even all four. I wasn't overly impressed how my TET avatar looked in the first two styles, but style three is quite possibly the coolest looking version of my avatar I've ever seen in a third party avatar creator. It's a very contemporary style. Style four, line art, is also not too bad. Avatar Maker's User Interface. Switch between the four different art styles shown across the top at any time. I particularly like the

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. 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 w

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

Inochi2D - Free Open Source 2D VTuber Avatar Rigging and Puppeteering Software (Part 1)

Inochi2D Creator - Free Open Source VTuber Software. If you've been looking for a way to live perform as a 2D cartoon avatar on camera, whether it be for a live stream or for pre-recorded content like educational videos, then VTuber software is a low cost (or even no cost) option worth looking into. In my previous post, How to Become a VTuber - 2D and 3D Software for Creating and Controlling Your Avatar , I took a brief look at the relatively new but completely free and open source Inochi2D which I thought showed great potential for my own needs of creating a live performance character rig for my own TET Avatar that I use for all my promotional materials. While it is possible to live perform my character using Cartoon Animator itself, Reallusion's MotionLive2D capture system isn't great - with lip sync in particular. More importantly though, I can't exactly teach people how to use Cartoon Animator if I'm using Cartoon Animator to control my Avatar. What is Inochi2D

Moho 14 Released - Still the Best 2D Animation Software for Indy Animators on a Budget

Moho 14 Released. Regular readers know I am a Reallusion, Cartoon Animator advocate through and through. Hands down I would recommend Cartoon Animator 5 first over Lost Marble's Moho 14 to anyone who is just starting in 2D animation, is a team of one, or just needs to animate as quickly as possible. However, feature for feature, Moho is, arguably, the best 2D animation software for the rest of us who can't justify a Toon Boom Harmony , or Adobe Creative Cloud subscription (and even with their applications Moho is very competitive on features). You can get started with Moho Debut for just USD$59.99 which is a cut down version of Moho Pro but it still has the most essential features needed for 2D animation. While Moho Pro is a whopping USD$399.99 (Cartoon Animator, which only has one version, is just USD$149.00) upgrades to new version numbers come down to a quarter of the price at USD$99.00. Even though Reallusion just released features like Motion Pilot Puppet Animation and

Artbreeder - Using AI created Character and Background Content in your Animations

A selection of User/AI generated images from Artbreeder. If you're looking for an endless supply of 2D character and background images for your animations then Artbreeder , an online Artificial Intelligence (AI) that generates image mash-ups you can tweak as much as you like, could be the ultimate content library. What is Artbreeder? Artbreeder is free to use though there are various paid plans, that give you additional features, such as higher resolution download images or more settings to play with. All images created on the site are Public Domain (CC0 License) and can be used in commercial projects. Using Artbreeder's online app you can generate head shot portraits, full body characters, landscapes, and other scenes simply by choosing two or more existing images to mash together then, using a series of sliders, to select which traits from each image you wish to lean toward in the final image. Photo Comparison - Top is my original uploaded photo. Bottom is Artbreeder's ap

Reallusion Releases Cartoon Animator 5 - One Version, More Features, Lower Price!

If you're serious about producing 2D animation as quickly as possible, while still achieving professional results, Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 makes the most compelling case yet as your animation studio/tool of choice. Cartoon Animator's point of difference has always been its ease of use and accelerated workflow. Creating fast, 2D animation using puppet, bone rigged based characters and props, on a stage with 3D depth for easy scene parallax effects. As it has developed Reallusion has incorporated more advanced features like motion capture for both face and body as well as being able to export scenes to post production tools like After Effects with the addition of plugins. After moving away from Flash based vector image support for a few years, Reallusion is back with full .SVG (scalable vector graphics) support for resolution independent graphics. They've also added Spring Dynamic physics and Full Form Deformation tools, both of which make it ridiculously easy t

Animation and Video Life

Search This Blog