Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Skateboarding Cage Monster by TET. Around the beginning of December 2018 I started work on a new CrazyTalk Animator 3 , G3 character of my own original design. Known as 'The Cage Monster' readers of my TET Life blog may recognize him as the Skatepark mascot for the long since closed Cage Skatepark . I didn't document the creation process in this blog, as I've done with other characters in the past, as I didn't want to start yet another series on a new character that I may or may not complete. At this stage I have completed a full G3 'side' view character rig which I managed to finish faster than usual because I could simply copy and paste all the hands and facial features from my G3 color monkey characters (that this character was derived from and which you can purchase in my Reallusion Marketplace store ). The Cage Monster will become available in my store when I've completed a front view character rig and his fully animated skateboard prop. The skate...

I first reviewed video creation site Renderforest back in November of 2017 . Since then they have been adding more and more content packs/tools to their cloud based video creation studio, branching into animated explainer video territory in the process (as well as logo and website design too). This review is focussed on their 3D Explainer Toolkit , but keep in mind, along with several different animated toolkits (including whiteboard), Renderforest has toolkit/templates to suit almost any video need from logo stings and music visualizations, through to complete video templates that can be highly customized with your own content. Click here to browse their template library. I am planning to review some of their other animated toolkits in the future but their 3D Explainer Toolkit particularly caught my eye because few (if any?) similar cloud animation services offer 3D animated styles. Global animation customizations in Renderforest's Studio. Renderforest's editing studio revol...

The Dork Knight was one of the very first animations I created in 2008 on the then very new GoAnimate (now known as Vyond ) website and animation studio. At the time it was featured as a Staff Pick and spawned two 'sequel' animated shorts. A very loose parody of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dork Knight reimagines Bruce Wayne as a preteen nerd who thinks he can be a superhero. This version of the character is rich enough to have a butler (Alfred) but lives a more suburban lifestyle with his 'Batcave' being his mother's garage. Anyway, to cut a long story short, over the years I've bought probably thousands of dollars of CrazyTalk Animator content packs that I've barely used. I really want to do more animation that doesn't take months to complete and is just made for the fun of telling a story. Remaking my old GoAnimation shorts is something for years I thought would be a fun challenge so I finally decided to give it a shot. Rather than use ...

This chicken really turned heads at the end of Reallusion's WIP 1 Video. Reallusion recently announced the next iteration of their 2D Animation studio, CrazyTalk Animator 3 , by unveiling a new name and a work in progress page on their website showcasing some of the new features. Now known as Cartoon Animator 4 , the new name signifies that CrazyTalk Animator has grown far beyond giving bodies to the morph based heads in CrazyTalk  and evolved into, as their tagline states, the one-for-all 2D animation software. CrazyTalk Animator 3 was such a leap forward, and has had so many new features added through periodical updates, that you might wonder if there was anything left to implement that would wow users. But Reallusion has managed to do just that. Some of the features revealed, which are explained in more detail, with video, on their WIP 1 page , include: Motion Enhancement Auto IK Rig Smart IK System Motion Retargeting Custom UI Rig Smooth Head Turn 360 Degree Head Turn G4 360 H...

This image was made with a stock DW photo and text added. I uploaded the semi transparent DW logo. If you create any kind of content, product or service online or off, whether you're a social media influencer, running a small business, writing a blog, making online video, or any number of other activities Design Wizard may be the cloud based graphics app for you. What is it? Design Wizard speeds up the graphic design process by giving you a library of pre designed templates, you can customize, suited to almost any situation. The process is simple. Choose a template size suited to the type of graphic you're designing. For example a Facebook Page Banner image or a Youtube Channel page image. Select a design along the lines of the style you're going for, then tweak and customize the design with your own text and/or graphics. There are templates for almost every conceivable graphic design situation from Facebook cover pages right through to DL print flyers and more. Templates ...

Something silly from an unfinished animation project. With the redesign finished, Animation and Video Blog (i.e. this blog) is now Animation and Video Life to bring it in line with my other blog, which I recently rebranded as The Extraordinary Tourist Life . Why the New Name? The purpose of the new names (but same URLs) is to kind of distance both blogs from the term 'blog' and to reposition them as more online magazines. Which is really what both sites have always been - where as a blog is more of a diary or journal, at least in its original incarnation. The addition of the word Life is very appropriate as I'll still be writing about my own projects and life inside animation and video, but it also extends to anyone's life in this field. Making it easier for me to have guest writers, should I choose to do that in the future. Easier to Read and Navigate on Any Device One of the main goals of the redesign was to make this site more adaptable to any size screen. Whilst t...

I realize I haven't posted anything to this blog since my last update in August. Largely because I haven't really worked on any of the things mentioned in that post that I was hoping to be going on with. Instead I've been focussed on completely upgrading and redesigning my main blog (now known as The Extraordinary Tourist Life or TET Life for short) into a more lifestyle magazine look and mobile friendly design. You should follow the link and check it out. It took quite a bit of work but I'm really proud of how it looks now. This Blog is Getting a Makeover Whilst I'm on a roll with redesigning things (I also gave my TETAnimations Youtube channel page a mini makeover), during November I will be giving this blog a similar makeover and template to my TET Life blog. Though it definitely won't be a matching template this time. I really want my two blogs to have their own identity moving forward. This post is a heads up for that change which will begin happening p...

Since the last time I did a Project Update Post  back in April I've become better organised by finally embracing Get It Done which is, in my opinion, the best of the many time management applications I've tried. #notsponsored. Anyhow I amalgamated all my task lists into that app so, whilst I can't physically work on every project I've started, thought about, got bored of etc. They're all listed, and at least not forgotten. So what am I working on over the next few months? My YouTube Channels (The Extraordinary Tourist & TET Animations) My original YouTube channel, The Extraordinary Tourist has recently had something of a makeover in order to clearly focus it on my two main interests going forward, Art and Skateboarding. I'm striving to release a video every Tuesday and Saturday and have mostly kept my schedule even if videos have been a day or two late. The Extraordinary Tourist YouTube Channel. I mention it here because the channel will feature some cross...

Mr Bowlsacc by Francesco Tammaccaro As promised in my post showcasing my own entry into Reallusion's Animation@Work Competition for 2018, this is my post letting you know the winners have been announced . This time my entry didn't even manage a special mention, unlike my entry from four years ago that won a Best Animation award in its category despite being shorter, taking less time to make, and featuring far less technical skill and actual animation, than my current entry. The fact is, in four years, awareness of CrazyTalk Animator, and the number of people who've become proficient with it has grown to a more competitive field. Demonstrated by the overall winner from 2014's competition , Garry Pye, coming in at third place with an animation that is easily streets ahead of his work with CTA from four years ago. Overall that's a good thing for Reallusion, CTA, and the CTA community. Especially CTA content creators interested in building a viable business in the Re...

Bat Storm Muvizu (left) In development Bat Storm iClone (right). If you've been following my work for a while you'll be familiar with my Batman parody character Bat Storm. The character first appeared as a GoAnimate Comedy World design . When GoAnimate dropped all its fun themes in favor of Business Animations I moved the character into the 3D realm of Muvizu shortly after I purchased a license for it in 2016. I really love Bat Storm's look in Muvizu. The thing is, as easy as Muvizu's developers claim their software is, I find trying to do any form of character animation with it to be infuriating. Which is why you haven't seen a single Bat Storm animation created in Muvizu so far. My Muvizu Bat Storm Character. Lately I've been experimenting with Reallusion's 3D Character Creator 2 for iClone 7, which is soon to be released as a stand alone application in version 3. Although I haven't done a lot of 3D animation with iClone I actually know my way around...

One of the most exciting things being developed with virtual reality systems like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift is creating animated films using 3D virtual puppetry. Flipside an application dedicated to the entire production of creating an animation using virtual puppets. It is literally a VR studio where you set up your set, lighting, cameras, and puppet your actors all in the VR environment. As a production environment it can be fully operated by a single person. Each character can be puppeted individually and then their performances overlaid into a full, multi-character animation. Even more exciting is that, because everything is done in real time, you can use Flipside to create live performances of your characters to virtual and augmented reality viewing audiences. See Flipside's video below for a more detailed overview of what it can do. Personally I haven't used Flipside so this is not a review. I'm just excited by the possibilities and wanted to share that with you...

Reallusion is running its Animation@Work Competition again. I've been away, not writing blog posts, so I could focus entirely on getting my entry done. Now that it's finished, this post I'm going to run through the creation of my entry and highlight some of the techniques I used to create it. As per 2014's competition I'm entering the Business Animation section of the competition, presumably playing to my strengths, and allowing me to create an animation entirely from pre-existing content store library elements. This category is judged mainly on story, story tempo, sound design and animation skill. There is a preference for significantly modified content store characters but it's not an essential requirement (which is where my entry is at its weakest - none of my characters are modified at all from their base character). My goal was to create my entry as quickly as possible. Reallusion has always promoted CrazyTalk Animator as a fast animation workflow and I wan...

Penguin Jump Pencil Roughs by TET. Hand drawn 2D animation, more commonly described as 'traditional' animation, where each character movement is meticulously drawn frame by frame is still one of the most versatile forms of the art. Essentially, if you can draw it, then it can be animated. There's really no limits other than your own drawing and animation skills. If you already have a digital drawing tablet or pen display monitor and want to get into hand drawn, 2D digital animation then these three applications are a great starting point and they're all completely free. Pencil2D Pencil 2D's User Interface is clean and very easy to learn. Pencil2D has been around for many years. In fact I first wrote about it here in 2009. It's an application that was a great idea but wasn't fully developed and could be buggy. After many years with no updates a new team appears to have taken on the task of developing the software further with a few upgrades. I took some tim...