Animation and Video Life

TET2d Avatar Image created with Dzine . R egular readers of Animation and Video Life will be familiar with my alter ego, 2D avatar character, TET, who is both the face of The Lazy Animator Cartoon Animator Tutorials, and is currently part of my Resident Dragon joke cartoon series. It is my goal to use him as an animated avatar for both my Lazy Animator video courses and my Cartoon Animator tutorials that you'll find on my @AnimLife YouTube channel . Unfortunately I don't have the time to animate him for every single project. Even with Cartoon Animator's time-saving workflow I wouldn't be able to produce animated content quick enough. Which is why advances in AI animation is something that is increasingly more interesting to me each day. Consistent Characters Before we get there I have to overcome one of the biggest hurdles in AI I've come across... reproducing my art style consistently. I don't want an approximation of my characters, I want my characters looki...

PixVerse's Show Muscle Effect is a real flex for other AI generative video sites. AI  generated digital avatars have improved greatly over the last 12 months, to the point where you can replace yourself with a digital, talking head, clone avatar that can say anything using your AI generated voice clone, and casual viewers wouldn't even notice. I tried cloning myself back in July of 2024 in my post,  Creating an AI Digital Avatar and Voice Clone of Myself with Free and Low Cost AI Tools . Since then, I've seen human clone channels on YouTube that I'd never guess in passing were digital humans. This is one of Hedra's better generations of video using my TET Avatar as a source. One area that has been slower to catch up is using AI to create 2D cartoon style avatars, from very specific character designs, that don't have realistic human proportions. I put my TET Avatar through Hedra , one of the best talking head avatar generators currently available, and got a compl...

A scene from Christmas List a short by TET. I released my end of year holiday short,  Resident Dragon: Christmas List , staring my avatar, TET, Red the Dragon, Cool Froyd the Cat, and Grrr Dog. You will be seeing more of these original characters in the future as I'm developing a six part series . Watch the holiday short below. Since it's been a while since I've done a behind the scenes deep dive into one of my own productions, I thought this animated short would be ideal to share some of my takeaways for what I learned or did that I think may help you in your own animated projects. Resident Dragon: Christmas List was completed over the space of around three weeks, working mostly a couple of hours in the evenings, then maybe 4-5 hours over the weekends. Here are my thoughts on the process. Writing the Script Excerpt from one of  AI Storywriter's Generations. I've been experimenting a lot with AI for writing scripts and I've come to the conclusion AI doesn't...

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...