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.

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

Jarrad Wright, The Big Lez Show - Who Would've thought Animating with MS Paint Could Take You So Far?

A friend of mine recommended I should check out The Big Lez Show after I mentioned to him I make animations for living. He said the show's creator, Australian animator, Jarrad Wright , just makes episodes from his home using MS Paint. Somewhat shamefully I hadn't heard of The Big Lez Show, but the fact that it was being made with MS Paint absolutely hooked me into checking out. If you've never heard or seen the show then you, like I was, are probably thinking how good could it be? MS Paint has kind of a cult following of hardcore animators but no one would use it as their primary animation tool on a series, right? WARNING - before going any further, you need to know The Big Lez Show and its humor contains some pretty strong language. By strong I mean it's peppered very liberally with the 'F' and 'C' words and is very every day Aussie, blue collar speak. Unapologetically, all of that, is part of why it's so good. There's a good chance you've

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

Eric W. Schwartz: Cartoonist, Animator and Amiga Die Hard

July 1992 Edition, CU Amiga Featuring Amy the Squirrel. American Cartoonist, Eric W. Schwartz , (whose unofficial Amiga Icon, Amy the Squirrel, is pictured on the July 92 edition of CU Amiga cover on the right) is my only real animation hero. Sure there are the big names like Disney , Chuck Jones , Tex Avery and even Preston Blair whose influences can all be seen in my own cartoons but Eric did what none of the others could. He showed that really great 2D computer animation was within my reach with little more than an Amiga Computer , a copy of Deluxe Paint and Moviesetter . This was at a time when computer based animation was in its infancy (outside of computer game animation) and Flash was something that lights did. There were many great Amiga artists but Eric was really the only one consistently making very funny, traditional style animations. His humor and drawing style is heavily influenced by classic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons but he managed to build on this,

Eleven Mostly Free Comic Book/Strip Resources For Your Next Motion Comic

Created with Lywi.com Comic Maker. One really exciting use for Cartoon Animator and other animation software is to assist in the production of creating motion comics. If you're not familiar with motion comics just think of them as a kind of video comic book that typically features (but not always) all of the dialogue in each panel read by voice actors along with limited animation to make the still images more dynamic and visually interesting. Below is a demonstration motion comic I made many years ago when I reviewed Smith Micro's Motion Artist software (which has since been discontinued but, if you can find a copy, its entire purpose was to create motion comics and other motion graphics). Follow the link to the review if you want to see how this was made. The great thing about motion comics is that they're much easier to animate than an animated cartoon short. Often much of the animation will be moving a a static image of a character, panning the camera across a scene cre

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