Animation and Video Life

Young TET VRoid Avatar in VSeeFace. In a previous YouTube video I demonstrated how you could use a webcam, Cartoon Animator and its MotionLive 2D Facial Capture system to create a virtual avatar that you could perform live during a live stream. Unfortunately the motion capture performance of this system is very average to say the least, and is even more expensive if you want to add hand motion capture via a Leap Motion Controller . This lead me down a rabbit hole of seeing what other solutions are out there, where I bumped into the world of the VTuber or Virtual YouTuber (creators who puppet and voice an on camera avatar instead of appearing on camera themselves). Specifically VTuber software, which has been a real eye opener for how expensive and far behind Reallusion's upper body motion capture system actually is. The VTuber world is heavily entrenched in the world of Anime so you'll see a lot of 2D and 3D avatars in this style. If fact, if an Anime avatar is your thing, y

Do you find yourself spending too much time creating background elements for your animations or just settling for flat colors or a static gradient as a back drop for your explainer videos? For myself I often just don't have the time to put more effort into my backgrounds (or I'm just too much The Lazy Animator ). Instant Animated Backgrounds AE Juice , who make animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for  After Effects ,  Premiere Pro , and  other video applications that support MP4 imports , have exactly what I needed with their  Animated Backgrounds Pack , which you can purchase individually or as part of several of their I Want It All Bundles  containing thousands of useful assets. I specifically purchased the AE Juice's Animated Backgrounds pack so I can continue to focus on all the foreground animation of my projects and instantly add another level of quality, with very little effort, by simply dropping in any of more than 100 animated ba

AI image generation is a rapidly developing field. Currently a debate is going on about AI Art image generators being trained on practicing, professional artist works without their permission, allowing almost anyone to create images in those artist's styles without compensating the artists in any way at all. Not to mention, that most AI image generator output is generally defined, by the U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress , as in the 'public domain', able to be used commercially by anyone. Technically that means if I try to sell an AI generated image as prints, anyone else can come along and take the exact same image and sell it as prints too. Legally it's very much a developing situation alongside the development of AI tools themselves, with online AI generators, such a Mage.space recently announcing a rewards program for AI model creators (an AI model is a general AI additionally trained on specific data sets, for example, many images from the same artist, t

I realize writing a five part series over almost three months makes creating a G3-360 SVG vector character in Cartoon Animator 5 look like a long and drawn out process. However, I want to assure you that, once you've designed your character and divided up, or created the bare minimum of required sprites, the actual rigging process should maybe take an afternoon to a day at most - excluding testing and refining the rig. Despite spending a lot of time debugging the Inkscape rigging template provided by Reallusion, I've also only been working on my character when I've sat down to write these articles every second week. (BTW, if you haven't read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , or Part 4 , just follow those links... it's been quite a process). I expect my next character will take no more than a couple of days to rig. To continue on, this week I fix the final few character design issues, then I rig my character's G3-360 head, add spring bones, and set up the color managem

I wanted to start this installment of my series, where I document the process of creating my first ever, complete vector character for Cartoon Animator 5 using Inkscape, on a positive note. After much study and pouring over various templates I can confirm I'm not the issue. The Inkscape template is buggy, even the new ones... or maybe it's Inkscape itself? The reason I say this is, when you're working with Reallusion's character templates, problems with creating these characters is nearly always down to human error. Quite often it's a simple spelling mistake on a folder that has to be a specific name, or you've deleted something you shouldn't have. However I've been studying over these templates in extensive detail. Not just trying to solve my issues but also pulling them apart to try and discover a way to make this process easier - like I did with creating G3-PSD characters in my Fastest Way to Rig a Character in Cartoon Animator  tutorials. If you have