Animation and Video Life

Original Go!Animate Bat Storm scene (left). iClone AI reimagined Bat Storm scene. A s mentioned in my introductory post to Building My Two Cartoon Web Series , Resident Dragon and Bat Storm, I'm also going to document the behind the scenes process for Bat Storm - starting with this post. Click the Resident Dragon link for the first behind the scenes post in that series. My Bat Storm series is an existing four part animated series I created nearly two decades ago with a cartoon making website then known as Go!Animate (now known as Vyond ). It's a little cringe to watch now but the story was strong and there was some good humor too.  My goal is to recreate the series using the ultimate cartoon making tool for dummies - generative AI. (I use the term 'dummies' in the sense that, just like Go!Animate, anyone can use AI to make cartoons). The AI Animated Cartoon Workflow Generative AI is an evolving space with different AI models being updated or emerging all the time. Reg...

Leonardo.ai's   Realtime Canvas. Create highly detailed images from simple drawings. I f you've had an idea for a character but don't have the artistic skill to design it yourself, or the budget to hire someone to do the design work for you, then Leonardo.ai's Realtime Canvas may be your new creative partner. Sure you could use Leonardo.ai's regular text prompt to image generator but that can be very hit and miss, and may take many generations before you finally craft a complex prompt that's getting something close to what you had in mind. Realtime Canvas, on the other hand, lets you craft a simple text prompt and draw a rough image, both of which you can keep refining until you get a final, real time, updated image that looks close to (and probably better than) what you had in mind. Using Realtime Canvas Once you've signed up for a free account with Leonardo.ai  (which will give you 150 free credits, renewed daily), click on Realtime Canvas, from the side...

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 ...

Mia and the Tourist Avatars created in Mannequin 2D Anime Character Generator. Background created with Leonardo.ai Readers of Animation and Video Life will know I love a character creator app. Specifically a 2D character creator app that I can use as a source for rigging animated characters in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator Software. In the course of exploring VTuber rigging and puppeteering software I came across Mannequin , a downloadable, 2D Anime character portrait generator that is specifically intended for VTubers and Game developers to utilize for creating their characters. While there is a free version of Mannequin, for a very low cost, one time payment, you can purchase the pro version which contains the most critical feature, The ability to export your characters as an optimized .PSD file for use with Adobe's Character Animator CC, .XFL for use with Adobe Animate, or an .SVG file (if you want the resolution independence of vectors). Both .PSD or .SVG files can be open...

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...

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...

A selection of Comicgen Characters. Readers of Animation and Video Life will know I'm always on the look out for any kind of free character creator tool.  While Comicgen Comic Creator isn't exactly the best character creator it caught my eye because it's completely free to use, and the available character designs really lend themselves to that edgy, limited style animation that has somewhat influenced mainstream animated shows of late. ComicGen's Comic Creator Comicgen's Character Creator. Comicgen was created by the team at Gramener , a data, science consulting and A.I. service that likes to present their findings as 'data stories' sometimes in the form of a comic. However, drawing not being a strong skill, they decided to make a tool that could provide them with characters they could just export into their own comic panels. That's how Comicgen was born. Interestingly, if you have drawing skills, Gramener will pay you to create characters for their app...

3D CC3 TET Character, based on my Oppa Doll Avatar, used as the base for a 2D CA4 character. One of my favorite things to do is to create characters with any type of Avatar/Character creator app. In fact the first test I usually try with these tools is, can I make an avatar of me (or at least my The Extraordinary Tourist persona). Previously I've used 2D character creators like Oppa Doll as a source of artwork for some characters I've made for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 animation studio but 2D character creators are limited to... well 2D. 3D Character Creators While you may think 3D character creators have no place in creating characters for 2D animation there are quite a number of advantages including: No drawing skills required. Render characters in any style. Use an art filter or even hand trace into line art. Need to animate the character in a specific pose or angle? Render out an image of the character in the required angle and animate it in 2D. Quicker to crea...