Animation and Video Life

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.  S ince 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...

This will be the definitive version of my TET Avatar character rig. F ollowing on from my introductory post to Building My Two Cartoon Web Series in this post I will be showing you the behind the scenes on the steps I'm following to draw and rig the first Resident Dragon character, TET, who is an avatar of myself. Typically you wouldn't start a web series by rigging characters but I've already scripted three of the six 2-3 minute episodes, and storyboarded the first two well over two years ago. Both storyboards are actually on my Instagram account if you dig far enough.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by David Arandle (@etourist.tet) The Easy Way to Draw Front Facing Human Characters Since all the characters for this series are pretty well defined in my Resident Dragon joke cartoons I'm able to start simply by sketching my first character in a front facing T-pose using my preferred bitmap drawing application, Krita . When drawing fro...

Bat Storm and TET from Resident Dragon, Behind the Scenes on these two series. Image by Gemini AI and TET. M any cartoonists, authors, short story writers, and other types of creators find themselves aspiring to make an animated cartoon web series because, although a challenging task, it's seen to be achievable by a team of one. You don't need a big studio, a killer pitch, or a big budget, (which would all be nice) you can just start making something yourself, in your spare time, on a shoe string budget. That's what this blog, going forward, will be focusing upon. I'm going to document the behind the scenes on how I'm making my two web series, which will hopefully inspire you to say, if he can do this with almost no budget, then maybe I can too. Along the way I plan to create guides and tutorials, so you aren't just seeing behind the scenes, you also have the option of following some of my processes step by step. Full disclaimer. This is just my process. I'm...

360 Microwave Meme Stills from PixVerse. The center images are the original character images used to generate the turnarounds. T ikTok 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/...

Do you get the feeling Red knows he's on the naughty list? T he last minute Christmas rush is pretty much upon us but it's not too late to create completely custom Christmas Cards to send to family and friends. Send them by email or take them to your local department store print on demand service if actual, physical Christmas cards is more your style. Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 is perfect for creating fun, Christmas themed cartoons, like my running joke above, with the cast of Resident Dragon , confronting Santa each year with TET's Christmas gift 'guide'. The Annual Last Minute Christmas Resource List This list is something of an annual event too, where I run through various Christmas themed products that caught my eye in Reallusion's, Cartoon Animator Marketplace this year. If creating unique holiday images (and animations of course) with Cartoon Animator is something you want to do, then save yourself a bunch of time with pre-made content you can pur...

H ave you ever wanted to send your friends and family fun, 2D animated, holiday messages, or just create 2D animated characters that you can make move and talk without learning difficult to master animation skills or spending hours drawing frame by frame? Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 is a professional quality, 2D animation studio software that is also very easy to produce impressive results with, even if you've never animated before, or can't draw. Don't Have Cartoon Animator 5 Download a free, 30 day trial . Easy Beginner Course I've created a completely free beginners course that teaches you my fast, easy way to rig and animate your first 2D custom character in Cartoon Animator 5 without complicated templates or any drawing skills at all. My online video course includes everything you need, including eight AI generated character sprite graphics, and four AI generated Human voice samples, so you can start learning right away. Eight AI generated character image...

I  first heard about Glif through a YouTube video that mentioned you could get access to Flux Pro (the latest 'game changer AI' generative image model) through the site for free. While I had a vague notion from the video of what Glif was, I wasn't expecting it to be so easy to get started with, and so good with my very first results. Glif is an easy to use, low-code platform for creating tiny AI-powered generators called Glifs. While that may not sound inspiring, what Glifs allow you to do is create a tiny app that niches down to a specific type of AI generation that the user modifies with their own inputs. The best way to really understand is with an example.  My First Glif I've recently been using VivaGo's AI platform  (free and unlimited at the time of writing) to consistently generate full body characters in a front facing T-Pose that I can rig as front facing characters in Cartoon Animator. Unfortunately it can be a bit hit or miss maintaining the T-Pose part...

O ver the years I've looked at various ways of creating and animating a digital avatar, from simply creating a character for Cartoon Animator and voicing and animating it myself, to creating a  live motion capture ready Vtuber avatar puppeted and voiced by me in real-time. In the last year or so, making photographic images talk, using AI and AI voice cloning has really progressed. To the point where I wondered if I could create a photographic AI avatar of myself, complete with my cloned voice, that I might use on some of my videos? Creating My Avatar: Artflow To create my avatar image, as far as I'm concerned,  Artflow.ai is the best value AI site for creating consistent digital characters (or 'actors' as Artflow calls them). That's pretty much their entire focus. Artflow's actor model training user interface. You get your first actor for free, 100 free credits per month (which equates to 100 still images per month - get an additional 50 credits if you sign...

Daz AI Studio uses 3D content to influence 2D text to image generations. B etter known for their completely free, 3D animation studio, Daz 3D have launched their own browser based, AI text to image generator, Daz AI Studio . All you need is a Daz 3D account to get started for free. Upgrade to a Premium plan for a small monthly fee for additional features.  At the time of writing Daz AI Studio is still in Beta so there are some features, yet to be released, that are standard on other dedicated AI image generator sites. While Daz AI Studio only produces 2D images, what makes it unique is that it has been trained on 3D content that helps guide the output. In particular you can select actual 3D character models as part of your settings and get fairly consistent images of that character every time. The About page suggests you'll also be able to select 3D environments and lighting settings to further influence your generations but these options were currently not available, as shown in t...