Animation and Video Life

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...

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...

Anime Amee Avatar in Cartoon Animator 5 is available for free in the Reallusion Marketplace . A bout a year and a half ago I started exploring VTuber software to see if I could turn my 2D, TET avatar into a live performance character that I could use when I record my Cartoon Animator tutorial videos. I explored quite a number of applications but I couldn't really find one that I was able to adapt my avatar to. It was possible but the applications that could do it were either too basic or too complex, with poor documentation, requiring more time and expertise than I had. Since then, Reallusion introduced their Puppet Stage to Cartoon Animator 5, and as far as I'm concerned, it rocketed past the competition as the best, most featured, and easiest to use software for VTuber's who want a 2D avatar, in any art style they can dream up. You're not limited to just Anime characters anymore. What is the Puppet Stage? Puppet Stage is specifically targeted at live streamers who r...

In part one of my deep dive into the free VTuber software, Inochi2D , I focused mainly on Inochi2D Creator, which is used for rigging your character avatar in the correct file format for use with Inochi2D Session, the puppeteering part of the software. The two sides of the software are still very much in development and the documentation, particularly for Session, is very thin on the ground. To the point where I don't think I could even do a comprehensive tutorial because I'm not sure I'm even doing things right, and the software could change significantly in a single update. As a result, in this part of my Inochi2D deep dive I'm changing tact from presenting my finished Cartoon Animator TET Avatar, and will be summarizing my experience of getting Session up and running using OpenSeeFace as the recommended webcam motion capture software. To do this I will be using  the TET avatar I created in my review of Mannequin , since that can be exported as a full, ready to go r...

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...

Even though I should be further away from the camera Dollars Mocap MONO still does a good job of  tracking my arms, hands and fingers. Ever since I wrote my series on becoming a VTuber , discovering it was possible to do full body motion capture, including hands and fingers, with just software and a webcam, I've been on the look out for any motion capture software that can bring that functionality to Cartoon Animator. Dollars Mocap is a low cost motion capture application with a free trial that I learned about through the YouTube Channel Digital Puppets  and their test video . It can record full body, upper body, arms and hands, and facial mocap from a live video source or pre-recorded video. Investigating further, I discovered not only does Dollars Mocap have a free iClone7, iClone8 character profile file download (look for it at the bottom of the main program download page), so you can use the saved motions with iClone8, they've also got a demo video for how to convert your...

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...