The Bendies - Quality Characters for CrazyTalk Animator 3 and Cartoon Animator 4 by Garry Pye

Garry Pye's Spy Guys for Cartoon Animator 4

Ever since winning Reallusion's Animation@Work competition back in 2014 Garry Pye has been a strong supporter of, and leading content creator for, CrazyTalk Animator 2, 3, and now Cartoon Animator 4 (A.K.A. CrazyTalk Animator 4).

So much so that Garry's Online store Garry Pye Creations is quite possibly the second biggest store for CrazyTalk/Cartoon Animator content after Reallusion's own Content Store and Marketplace.

Garry's Little Mates Characters for CTA 3 have been hugely successful with more than 60 different characters available.

Since then Garry has followed up the Little Mates with a new character series, The Bendies. Initially created for CTA3, all bendies released after the launch of CA4 in April have been designed with the new 360 head system, and facial puppetry compatibility (something that hasn't been a feature in the Little Mates range).

The Bendies series differ in that they feature none of the outlines that is typical of Garry's previous creations and 2D comic/cartoon style animation in general. Despite this the characters are very much very recognizable as Garry's art.

Some of The Bendies Themes and Cast.

As with the Little Mates, the Bendies, while sold individually, come in a range of linked themes for you to collect the whole set including:

Astronauts
Sci fi Guys
The Vikings
Spy Guys
Adventure Bendies

Since the Bendies are also proving popular no doubt there will be many more themes to come.

I recently purchased a few Bendies, including the newly released Adventurer Bendie, which comes in versions with or without his jacket, and props of his Fedora and Bullwhip (the whip is an animatable G3 freebone actor file). You also get the regular G3 character for CTA3, and the 360 head version for CA4.

In terms of animating Garry's characters, The Bendies range in particular work well with premade motions for G3 characters.

The only caveat being that Garry likes to include a lot of detail in the form of accessories attached to the character, such as long hair, bags, holsters etc. The detail and extras are great (and very welcome) but they come at a price of making some of the characters a little more labor intensive to animate.

Long hair accessories require a
little extra effort to animate.

Mostly this is an issue for long haired Bendies if you want their hair accessories to move naturally with the character's head movements. Any part of the hair that is attached as an accessory will generally need a bit of keyframing so it looks like it's reacting to gravity and physics as you would expect.

It is a small price to pay for such high quality characters that would not look out of place in any professionally produced animation production (including yours!).

Garry's online store also contains an entire library of high quality props, scenes, and even voice packs from many other artists, hand picked by Garry to compliment his work. It's very hard not to fill you cart with a bunch of scenes and props you never knew you needed but you know would really take your animated production to the next level.

Below is a scene from an animation I've started working on featuring Bendies, Vermund from the Vikings theme, and Mayday from Spy Guys, in a background set called Calm Day by Anton Bakhmat (also available from Garry's store). Lightening effects are from Reallusion's Weather Maker pack - which is a must buy for any CTA3/CA4 animator.

One of my favorite things to do is to mix and match characters together that you wouldn't immediately think would make a great team. This animation is called 'Origins' with this scene being the moment Vermund and Mayday first encounter each other.

Sometimes time travel can get awkward. Mayday arrives
at a less than opportune moment for Vermund.

If you've discovered CrazyTalk Animator 3 or Cartoon Animator 4 and have yet to discover Garry Pye Creations, go and check out all the content there, including The Bendies. You'll be hard pressed to stop at buying just one.

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