Creating a G3 Monkey Character for CrazyTalk Animator 3

This sketch only took about 10-15 minutes. Using a
symmetrical ruler meant I only had to draw
the left side of the image.

Last post I mentioned my intention to develop an animation series based around my color monkey characters.

Recognizing that just saying something won't make it happen, today I started work on actually drawing and rigging the color monkey characters themselves.

It's definitely a task that comes with some trepidation and a definite sense of déjà vu as I've been here before. A few years back I attempted to rig this same character in CrazyTalk Animator 2 as a G2 character. It was a lot of work that I ended up being overwhelmed by.

This time I'm rigging the character in CrazyTalk Animator 3 as a G3 character. It's less work but still not a complete cakewalk. Unlike multi-angle G2 characters, G3 characters are only single angle. In theory you could draw and rig one from scratch inside a day (including all the additional hand and face sprites)

Anyway, I'm not going into too much detail here. This isn't meant to be a tutorial since I've never fully rigged a G3 character from scratch myself. I just wanted to show that I've started on this idea I had.

Day one progress. Main
character drawing complete.

If you are wondering, I'm using the G3 human, front facing, Photoshop template that comes with CTA3's Pipeline edition. However I'm doing all my drawing in Clip Studio Paint (which supports Photoshop files) because, a) I don't have Photoshop, and b) I like to do my line art with vector tools. The vector layers will be converted to raster in the final template. I just like being able to edit and manipulate my line work even after I've drawn it.

By the end of my session I have my complete base rig drawn and colored. Next up I have to draw and color all the hand and face sprites. I'm hoping that won't take too long. If I can get through them, this character rig will definitely get finished.

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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I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even

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Source Photo from Generated Photos . Ever since Reallusion introduced the G3-360 Character Head into Cartoon Animator 4 I've wanted to see if their 360 Head Creator tool could be used to create an animated head using a photo. Part of the reason I've never given this a shot, until now, is that I just assumed it would be difficult, and require a lot of photo editing to blend out the sprite edges. It turns out, creating a photographic G3-360 head is not that much more difficult than creating a cartoon head, and can be done using a single photographic image using my own G3-360 head rigging system . While this article isn't intended to be a full tutorial, I'll run through the basic steps of how I achieved my photographic G3-360 head, shown in the comparison below, of a Cartoon Animator Morph-based head on the left, and my G3-360 head on the right. Pros and Cons Cartoon Animator's morph-based head system is ideal for animating photographic faces. It uses a semi 3D wire me

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