Bat Storm Applies for a Job - iClone Lip-sync Animation Contest 2021

Bat Storm, Day Job by TET.

This month Reallusion launched its iClone Lip-Sync Animation Contest in which animators are asked to make a 30 second iClone animation created using one or more of iClone's lip-syncing and facial animation tools or plugins.

This includes; AccuLips, ExPlus, Facial Mocap, and even the new iClone plugin for Replica's AI TSS voice system.

If you'd like to enter you still have plenty of time as submissions close on September 30, 2021. The total prize pool is valued at over USD$40,000 with first prize being $3000 in cash.

If you don't have iClone, but are interested in giving 3D animation a try, you can download free 30 day trials of iClone 7, Character Creator 3, 3DXChange 7, and Unreal Live Link, which can all be accessed from the competition site.

There's also 50% discount for perpetual licenses if you do decide to purchase any (and I do highly recommend - and use - iClone 7 and Character Creator 3 as two of the easiest 3D animation tools to get started with - especially if you're already familiar with Cartoon Animator 4).

Bat Storm, Day Job - My Entry and Behind the Scenes

Given that 30 seconds is not a lot of animation to complete when you have Reallusion's time saving tools for lip-sync and facial animation, I decided to give the contest a go. View my entry below.

If you're not familiar with Bat Storm, he's a character I created over ten years ago and have written about many times in my quest to bring him from 2D to 3D animation. Reallusion's iClone 7 and Character Creator 3 finally made that a reality without me having to learn 3D modeling.

My entry is inspired by a very old Bat Storm Animated short called Financial Crisis (part 1) in which Bat Storm applies for a second day job in order to pay his bills.

The voice was done using Replica's AI, Text To Speech voices which, I feel, are the best TTS voices I've come across since they're based on actually human voice samples.

The Bat Storm character was created with Character Creator 3, and all animation was done in iClone, with exception to the two characters you can see over Bat Storm's shoulder.

Water Valet animated Short.

Long time readers of this blog will recognise them from my animated short, Water Valet. The two characters were exported out of Cartoon Animator 4 as a transparent PopVideo and imported directly into iClone7.

If you would like to see a more in depth overview of how I created my entry, I put together a behind the scenes work-in-progress video (which was a requirement of the competition) detailing every aspect from start to finish. Watch it below.

Comments

LTX Studio (Beta): AI-Powered Visual Storytelling, From Script to Screen in One App.

LTX Studio can generate consistent characters across storyboard panels - even if one character is a dragon! W hile text to image, and text to video (and image to video) AI tend to be getting a lot of the press, the real exciting aspect of generative AI implementation is how it can be used to speed up creator workflow. Being able to realize your creative vision in a shorter length of time can lead to more ambitious projects. Particularly if you're a team of one, with a very limited budget, but you one day dream of creating your own epic animated feature film. LTX Studio (beta), a new 'all-in-one' AI film making tool, is not going to let you realize that dream from a single text prompt but, by bringing a bunch of generative AI technologies together, the developers have created a one platform workflow that can help anyone rapidly visualize and deliver a story from initial idea to finished film in days rather than weeks (depending upon how ambitious the project is). Even bette...

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...

TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme and How You Can Use It For 2D Animated Character Turnarounds

360 Microwave Meme Stills from PixVerse. The center images are the original character images used to generate the turnarounds. T ikTok art drama, where wannabe artists, who have no clue about professional art practices, but are still happy to gatekeep their idea of how professional artists work, is reason enough to stay off the platform. I have no doubt there are a few insufferable professionals on there gatekeeping too. Case in point, TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme , which I discovered through a suggested video on YouTube called, The Microwave Art Drama Breaking the Art Community on TikTok by art drama showcaser, Mohammed Agbadi . Apparently TikTok's animation community is livid that using this effect on your 2D character to achieve a fully animated, 360 degree turnaround, is just the absolute lowest thing you can do. You cannot, in good conscience, call yourself an artist, or an animator, if you do this, and, even worse, post it on TikTok. In retaliation 'real' artist/...

The Ultimate Independent Animator's App and Resource List - Animation and Video Life

Image created with Cartoon Animator 4. Being an independent animator is not like a studio animation job. There's so much more to do that is indirectly related to the actual task of animating. Over the years I've sought out many apps, tools, and services that can help me achieve that one single task, expressing myself through animation. Below is my Ultimate Independent Animator's Resource List for 2024 (last updated Oct 2024). It started out as a list of free or low cost apps that could help you in every stage of producing either 2D or 3D animation, and then just kind of grew from there. You may not have been looking for a Time Management App as much as you needed something to get you started in 3D animation but when those commissioned projects start coming in you'll have a head start on maximizing your time. All the apps and services on this list had to meet two main criteria: They had to be useful and relevant to an Indy Animator/artist. The base app/se...

Krita AI Diffusion - Generative Image AI For Krita is Seriously Useful, Powerful and Free (If You Can Install it Locally)

Generative AI sequence of a woman in a business suit. From sketch to refined image using Krita AI Diffusion - by TET G enerative image AI, where you describe an image with a text prompt to an Artificial Intelligence model and it produces a new image based on your prompt, is gaining a strong hold as a tool for many artists. Krita AI Diffusion brings generative AI image tools right into your favourite free and opensource, graphics editor, Krita. Not only that, if you have a computer with decent specs (and at least 10GB of hard drive space), Krita AI Diffusion is completely free. What If I Don't Have a Powerful Computer? If you're in my situation, with a computer that was around before anyone in the mainstream had even heard of generative AI, you can still access Krita AI Diffusion for free, using a cloud based AI server, Interstice and 300 tokens, to get you started. Once your initial tokens run out, purchase 5000 more for 10€ (approx US$11.00). Tokens never expire. I would...

Review: Toon Boom Harmony 14 - What I learned in 21 Days

Toon Boom Harmony is widely considered the industry standard for primarily 2D animation. You don't get to be that if your software isn't exceptional. However, industry standard and exceptional usually translates to steep learning curve and probably contains more features than I'll ever use. So, in reviewing the latest version, Harmony 14, I'm setting out to answer two questions; How easy is it to learn the basics and is it software an independent artist/animator, like myself, should seriously consider as their go to, 2D animation studio of choice?

Dollars Mocap: Full Body Webcam Motion Capture (Including Hands and Fingers) For iClone and Cartoon Animator

Even though I should be further away from the camera Dollars Mocap MONO still does a good job of tracking my arms, hands and fingers. Ever since I wrote my series on becoming a VTuber , discovering it was possible to do full body motion capture, including hands and fingers, with just software and a webcam, I've been on the look out for any motion capture software that can bring that functionality to Cartoon Animator. Dollars Mocap is a low cost motion capture application with a free trial that I learned about through the YouTube Channel Digital Puppets and their test video . It can record full body, upper body, arms and hands, and facial mocap from a live video source or pre-recorded video. Investigating further, I discovered not only does Dollars Mocap have a free iClone7, iClone8 character profile file download (look for it at the bottom of the main program download page), so you can use the saved motions with iClone8, they've also got a demo video for how to convert your...

Animation and Video Life

Search This Blog