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.

TikTok 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/animators have been hand drawing and animating their 2D character, 360 degree, microwave turnarounds because that's how insecure they are about being perceived as 'cheating'.

That's fine, but, if you're actually interested in making animated cartoons, anything that can speed up your workflow is an asset.

How You Can Use the 360 Microwave Meme with Cartoon Animator 5

Chad Danger Microwave 360 spin created with PixVerse.AI.

If you're using characters from the Reallusion Cartoon Animator Marketplace there may be times when you want to animate characters from an angle the developer has not created. To demonstrate how to do this I'm going to use a mash up of two Garry Pye characters I created named, Chad Danger (Chad's head on Jack Danger's body).

Step 1 - Export a PNG image of your character in a T-Pose

Chad Danger in Cartoon Animator 5 ready to export as a transparent PNG.

Export a transparent PNG image of your character from Cartoon Animator in a T-Pose but make sure the feet and legs have a wide stance too for best results. I exported in 4K (4096 pixels square) but it's not really necessary to go this large.

Step 2 - Create the 360 Microwave Turnaround with PixVerse AI.

In PixVerse: 1) Select Effect. 2) Choose 360 Microwave.
3) Upload your Character PNG. 4) Click Create.

On the free plan PixVerse will give you 90 credits to start, and then 60 credits, refreshed daily. Fortunately the 360 Microwave effect is pretty consistent if you give it a good image. Most times my first generation has been just fine.

The free output will be lowres 640p with watermark (fortunately, out of the way in the top left of the video). For an extra 50 credits you can upscale the video resolution to 2160p from the menu on the video's preview page.

Once you have the video, download it to your computer.

Step 3 - Extract the Key Frames

You can import the video into Cartoon Animator to extract the key frames, or you can use your video editor if you know how to export individual images.

Using Cartoon Animator to extract key frames from PixVerse's video file.

If you're intending to use the turnaround to rig a complete alternate angle of the character you only need to choose a key frame for character facing angles; 315 (the one I started with here), 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, and 270. This should give you enough angles of each body part to Frankenstein a rig for any of those angles together.

You'll need to source limbs from different angles to get a complete, usable rig. Save each frame angle out as a PNG. I saved them at 4096px but half that is closer to the videos actual resolution.

Once you have the individual frames you can remove the background either with dedicated graphics software, or you can bring each frame into Cartoon Animator as a prop, and use the Mask Editor in the Composer before exporting each frame again as transparent PNGs.

A Simple Example

It's very possible you don't need a full, alternate angle character rig for your project. Say you have just a single scene where you need to see your character from behind, and they only need to move a little bit for effect. That's where this can really save you time.

In my example below, I took the full 135 degree angle key frame, removed the background, and then rigged the single character sprite as a quick freebone character. I manually keyframed a little bit of movement into his limbs, and I was done. A very easy and fast way to get another angle quickly.

Chad Danger swims toward Jack Danger's rescue boat. Characters, sky, and sea
by Garry Pye. Boat and foreground water reflection by Reallusion.

Don't let the gatekeepers tell you using AI to save time is a bad thing. Artists and especially animators have always taken short cuts to speed up production - even the great Disney animators redrew entire sequences from earlier films to save time planning out the animation. 

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