Rigging My First Vector Character in Cartoon Animator 5 For My Resident Dragon, 2D Animated Web Series

My TET Avatar character in Cartoon Animator 5. Smooth Mode Face Setup lets you map 
face feature movements to the Face Key Detail Settings sliders for greater control. 

Since my previous post I have completely finished drawing the front facing angle of my TET Avatar in Inkscape, transferred all the sprites to a front facing human template in Affinity, and I am testing the rig so far in Cartoon Animator 5.

For the most part it's going well. The only challenges are the ones I'm creating for myself - as opposed to ones often faced from not knowing the software enough to know when you're doing something wrong.

Resident Dragon cartoon by TET.

If you're not familiar with this project, this is a behind the scenes on my 2D animated web series, Resident Dragon, which is all about an eight to nine foot tall fire dragon called Red, living in the suburbs with his former director and friend, TET, in TET's house. TET has a cat called Cool Froyd, and a dog known as Grrr Dog.

I've mentioned previously I've already written the first three, two to three minute episode scripts of a six part series, and storyboarded two. I'm now building the character rigs, starting with TET (who is an avatar of myself).

Rigging a 'Hero' Character

TET is a 'Hero' character otherwise known as a main character, therefore I'm aiming to create the most advanced puppet rig for him, that Reallusion's Cartoon Animator will allow, for the most flexibility in posing and animation.

He's also a traditionally designed 'Saturday Morning Cartoon' style character with outlines. Requiring me to use all my knowledge on how to rig outlined characters so that the outlines don't 'break' when joints are moved to their extremes. I demonstrated some of this in my last post.

Even more importantly, I'm using a completely new technique to rig his face in Cartoon Animator.

Smooth Mode

Most people rig their characters face in Cartoon Animator using a combination of sprite switching and face deformations. It works well but requires your character to have a minimum of six different eye sprites, and fifteen different mouth sprites - which can be a lot of extra drawing to do well.

I discovered Smooth Mode when Cartoon Animator released its Puppet Stage Live feature for V-Tubers. Smooth Mode is an extra mode added to the face setup feature where you can create even more expressions simply by using wire frame distortions to bend and twist your existing face sprites even more.

Setting up an eyeblink animation in Smooth Mode.

Smooth mode lets you set up a key frame for various expressions and that feature will smoothly animate from the default position to your key frame. For example, key frame an eye blink, and the eye will now animate from open to closed and back again, just like a real eye, no sprite switching required.

The upshot is, you only need one eye sprite (with separate eye white, eyelid, and whatever other eye element you want to add), and one mouth sprite (with separate mouth interior, upper lip, lower lip, and whatever else you want to add).

Anything that eliminates the need to draw and color fifteen mouth sprites and six eye sprites is a win in my book (I do call myself 'The Lazy Animator' for a reason) with the added benefit that Smooth Mode works better with face motion capture than sprite swapping too (that's why it's aimed at V-Tubers).

Where I'm At...

Rigging the body of my TET avatar has been mostly smooth sailing. All my main joints move as intended with unbroken lines and the ability to change the layer order on the joints and still maintain unbroken lines.

Front of the hand on the left. Current back
of the hand on the right. See all the joint lines.

I'm currently trying to create the same type of joints in my character's bone hands but so far this is proving elusive. I can get the fingers to all look fine, with unbroken lines when you pose them but, as soon as I flip the hand to the back, you can see all the joints. It looks awful.

I do know a fix that will work - adding all my finger joint circles to the character as accessories - but I really want to make the joints part of the rig, like I've done with the elbow and knee joints. This involves adding a dedicated bone to the joint that the joint circle is attached to.

It works fine on the body, but I can't quite work out the bone naming structure for the hands. I do know you can add extra bones to the hands because I've done it using the bone editor inside Cartoon Animator. I just haven't worked out the naming structure for that to work directly from the character template.

That's where the character is at the moment. Once I work out the hands I'll move on to rigging the face, and will cover that in the next update. In the meantime, if you like a more detailed update, and demonstration of Smooth Mode, watch my video update on the project embeded below.

 

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