Animation and Video Life

Tiny World Effect - LunaPic. There are many different, free, graphic and photo image editors out there, I particularly recommend Krita as an all in one, free graphics tool. However if you want something online, browser based, and connected to a bunch of sites you probably use that can apply a wide range of filters, artistic, and animation effects with one click, LunaPic is well worth looking into. It's two key features, in my opinion, are: So many different effects, filters, and animations, I kept getting distracted from writing this article trying many of them out. I lost hours of time and still barely scratched the surface. There is everything from automatic background removal to templates for turning your images into motivational posters. Not to mention a good selection of animation effects too, from converting an MP4 file to an animated GIF file, through to adding animated water effects to an image.   Quite a number of the effects are one click to apply, with a single slider ...

Plask lets you motion capture full body movement with only a webcam. Companies that produce 2D and 3D animation software seem to be very focused on using motion capture right now to speed up the animation process.  Unfortunately full body motion capture equipment, while very effective, is still quite expensive for someone like me who doesn't have a budget for such equipment. So, when I heard about Plask , a free, browser based, app that can capture full body motion capture data from an imported video or webcam, it was only natural that I would want to give it a try. I was hopeful that I would be able to use it with my Reallusion apps, iClone7 or Cartoon Animator 4 , both of which support motion capture data in their workflows. Plask's creators claim their app is easy to learn, while I generally would agree, it took me a while to locate their video tutorials.  For some reason they're listed under the 'Help' section of the manual. I would highly recommend they be put...

Source Photo from Generated Photos . Ever since Reallusion introduced the G3-360 Character Head into Cartoon Animator 4 I've wanted to see if their 360 Head Creator tool could be used to create an animated head using a photo. Part of the reason I've never given this a shot, until now, is that I just assumed it would be difficult, and require a lot of photo editing to blend out the sprite edges. It turns out, creating a photographic G3-360 head is not that much more difficult than creating a cartoon head, and can be done using a single photographic image using my own G3-360 head rigging system . While this article isn't intended to be a full tutorial, I'll run through the basic steps of how I achieved my photographic G3-360 head, shown in the comparison below, of a Cartoon Animator Morph-based head on the left, and my G3-360 head on the right. Pros and Cons Cartoon Animator's morph-based head system is ideal for animating photographic faces. It uses a semi 3D wire me...

Merry Christmas from Animation and Video Life.  It's the most wonderful time of the year... well not yet. The Nightmare Before Christmas is not just the animated Tim Burton movie, it's also the nightmare of trying to make your own animated holiday messages in the week before Christmas. Animation takes time. Why didn't you start those in November?! If this sounds like your nightmare, here are five free or low(ish) cost apps to help you back to sharing the joy of the season with animation, so it truly will be the most wonderful time of the year. Cartoon Animator 4 (or iClone7 ) Reallusion Marketplace search 'Christmas'. If you're already a power user (or even know your way around it a little bit) you'll know CA4 is one of the fastest ways to make completely custom animations. The Reallusion Marketplace has a bunch of Christmas content you can utilize, just don't be too ambitious. Drop in a background, throw in a Santa character, record a short message f...

Christian Haynes - Zack In Time.  If you've ever wanted to create an animated TV series staring your own original characters and stories then Los Angeles based writer, director, and animator, Christian Haynes is taking those next steps of putting together a team, developing a pitch/trailer for their series, Zack In Time. Featuring professional studio quality animation, they hope the show will get picked up by an animation studio for an official series. The path he and his team are taking is one you could easily follow as they deal with real life commitments, and building a following on Instagram and Tik-Tok showcasing their work behind the scenes. TET: Tell me a little about yourself. Who you are, and why you started animating? My name is Christian Haynes and I've loved animation ever since I was a kid. I would constantly be drawing cartoon characters from TV shows and movies and making my own little homemade comic strips.  As I got older, I became a lot more interested in s...

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...

Always start with a good microphone.  Bad Audio is widely considered the number one reason people will stop listening to a podcast or watching a video. While your audio doesn't have to be amazing it does, at least, have to be clear and audible for listeners to not give up on it. I've always had trouble recording my own voice because I'm naturally softly spoken. When I do speak up I can't maintain it for long sentences. Even with quality microphones, the higher range of my natural speaking voice isn't that loud - even with my mouth less than a foot away. As you can imagine, recording three and a half hours of me talking while demonstrating all the features of a software application, as I do in The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , was always going to result in some pretty uneven audio (who can remember to keep talking loud while you're concentrating on a demonstration). I thought my audio was passable but I did get some strong feedback, pri...