Skip to main content

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

Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5

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 to create lively character animation and motion graphics fast.

All this is, in addition to its already impressive features, packed into one complete version (no more cut down, cheaper 'PRO' version) at a price that is almost 25% cheaper than the full version of its predecessor, Cartoon Animator 4. Unfortunately Reallusion did announce they are no longer releasing a Mac version, though I believe you can get Cartoon Animator 5 running on a Mac using Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

New Features Overview

Spring Dynamics

Choose among 10 Spring presets representing different material qualities: from stiff to rubbery and hefty to wispy.
Choose among 10 Spring presets
representing different material
qualities: from stiff to rubbery
and hefty to wispy.
Probably the most immediately impressive of the new features Spring Dynamics brings some real world physics to Cartoon Animator. Once you've set up your rig's spring bones to how you want them to react to movement, using any of the ten fully adjustable presets, you're pretty much done. Animate your character or prop using existing motion files, create your own motions, or even using motion capture (Motion Live 2D plugin required), and your defined spring bones will animate themselves according to their physics settings.

It really does make all the difference in making characters and props feel more alive and natural.

Free Form Deformation (FFD)

With more than 100 Free Form Deformation presets you can get a lot of animation done fast simply through drag and drop.
With more than 100 Free Form Deformation
presets you can get a lot of animation done
fast simply through drag and drop.
Using Free Form Deformation animation principles such as squash, stretch, and exaggeration become effortless simply using a deformation grid and any of the 109 preset deformations (or create your own).

What's more these can be applied after animating your prop or character performing any kind of motion for further effect. For example if you wanted to add squash and stretch to animation created with human motion capture to give it a more cartoon like feel.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

SVG support makes it possible to group areas of color together making it easy to change color schemes.
SVG support makes it possible to group
areas of color together making it easy
to change color schemes.
Earlier iterations of Cartoon Animator used to support vector graphics through Adobe Flash's .SWF file format. Unfortunately it really limited who could create vector graphics for the platform. After refocusing on high quality raster graphics, though .PSD file support for a few years, Reallusion has heard their user's call to bring back vector support through the standard SVG file format.

Now anyone can create resolution independent characters, props, and scenes, for Cartoon Animator using their preferred vector graphics tool. It's a real win for everyone.

Smart Content Manager

This one is more of a big deal for existing users who have long complained about how hard it is to manage and find anything in their Content Library. Cartoon Animator comes with over 1700 included assets to get you started and now you can easily tag, search, and sort these into a better organized Content Library. As well as all the additional content you're likely to purchase (and don't forget all the free content in Reallusion's Marketplace).

Cartoon Animator finally gets a Content Library search option as part of the new Smart Content Manager.
Cartoon Animator finally gets a Content Library search option as
part of the new Smart Content Manager.

It's also a breeze to download any content you've purchased from Reallusion's Content Store or Marketplace, as well as setting up all your content so it can be shared over a network between multiple licenses (ideal for animation studios).


The 2D Animation Tool for You

Unless you're determined to animate with hand drawn images and love the challenge of taking weeks, even months to create a few seconds of full color animation at a time, you'd be mad not to give Cartoon Animator 5 your consideration.

Cartoon Animator is not trying to be a one stop studio for your complete animation workflow. What it does well is speed up your animation workflow, while maintaining a professional quality. Around that you have choices as to what graphics software you want to link to it, and what video post production tools you want to output to for additional effects.

If you can draw and know how to manually key frame puppet rigs that's great, but if not, you're supported by quality content in the Reallusion Content Store and Marketplace that can all be used in commercial projects, and all of Cartoon Animator's short cuts to speed up your workflow.

I personally recommend it to anyone wanting to get into independent animation, particularly solo animators. It will allow you to create far more animation in less time, making it very viable for something like a weekly, animated web series.

Cartoon Animator 5 is available as a free 30 day trial download with plenty of free tutorials to get you started in Reallusion's Learning Center.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Wonder Unit Storyboarder - Free Storyboarding Software for People Who Can (or Can't) Draw

Wonder Unit Storyboarder.  As an independent and solo animator I'm always tempted to try and skip storyboarding my animated shorts because they're usually only single scene sketch comedy type jokes. As a result I have many unfinished projects that kind of petered out due to having no clear finishing line. Storyboarding your productions, no matter how small, gives you a step by step guide of every shot that needs to be completed (no planning shots as you animate). It also allows you to create an animatic that gives you a rough preview of the finished production. In short, you shouldn't skip storyboards as they, generally, increase the chance of the project being completed. Disclaimer - I'm Not a Fan of Storyboarder Upfront, Wonder Unit's Storyboarder  is not my preferred storyboarding software. However it's completely free, has a number of very compelling featu

Zack in Time - Support an Independent 2D Animated Series that is Creating Opportunities for New Talent

Z ack in Time is an independent, 2D animated series about a biracial 13-year-old  teen, who has trouble fitting in at his new school, until he finds a time-traveling watch developed by a secret government agency.  Created by Christian Haynes, who I featured in December of 2021 , and produced by Imhapie , the production has now launched a Kickstarter  (which runs until October 25th, 2024) to fund the development of the series pilot episode, as well as a full series, which is ready to produce. Why You Should Support Zack in Time Zack In Time is more than just another 2D animated series hoping to be successful, and is worth your consideration on two levels. Not only does the series hope to tell a fun and authentic story, showcasing unique characters but also, behind the scenes, the producers hope it continues to be a launching pad for young artists' careers.  A Relatable Story that Promotes Diversity and Representation The story of Zack in Time reflects the struggle that we all feel a

Glif (Alpha) - Make Your Own Tiny AI Powered Niche Image Generator Apps

I  first heard about Glif through a YouTube video that mentioned you could get access to Flux Pro (the latest 'game changer AI' generative image model) through the site for free. While I had a vague notion from the video of what Glif was, I wasn't expecting it to be so easy to get started with, and so good with my very first results. Glif is an easy to use, low-code platform for creating tiny AI-powered generators called Glifs. While that may not sound inspiring, what Glifs allow you to do is create a tiny app that niches down to a specific type of AI generation that the user modifies with their own inputs. The best way to really understand is with an example.  My First Glif I've recently been using VivaGo's AI platform  (free and unlimited at the time of writing) to consistently generate full body characters in a front facing T-Pose that I can rig as front facing characters in Cartoon Animator. Unfortunately it can be a bit hit or miss maintaining the T-Pose part

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

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

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