Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Introduction If you're like me and have been using GoAnimate to create low cost explainer videos or other animated cartoons then you'll certainly have discovered many of GoAnimate's limitations. You may even be looking for an alternative? CrazyTalk Animator 2 by Reallusion is a professional animation studio that, like GoAnimate, requires no drawing skills at all but can give you more flexibility to animate your ideas exactly as you visualise them. It may be the animation solution you've really be looking for. GoAnimate, a cloud based and easy to learn animation studio, gives you access to an extensive library of predefined and pre-animated content. It's pretty great and highly optimised for the business market. However new users run into the limitations very quickly. Usually by discovering a character can't perform some action they need, often having to find some kind of compromise or work around. Custom Characters created with Reallusion's Avatar creatio...

Animation Paper. I've written about Animation Paper previously when I heard the original (and free) Plastic Animation Paper (PAP) was finally going to get a major overhaul with a new modern user interface and more features. Now you can help make that happen by donating to the developers Indiegogo funding campaign . If you're not familiar with Animation Paper or PAP go read my two previous articles. In a nutshell, despite the terrible User Interface, Plastic Animation Paper is still one of the best tools available for creating hand drawn animation using tablet input such as a WACOM tablet. Watch the campaign's introductory video below then visit the campaign page for two more videos explaining what features are being included and how your money will be used. Currently the developers are focused on producing a native MAC version of the software but there will be a native Windows version developed shortly after that. If you are a Windows user then there's a special perk ...

Sorry to my regular readers for not posting for some time. Unfortunately when Animation 4 Business is good I don't get all the time I need to post regularly here. I've also been struggling with the latest iClone 5 Quick Fix Tutorial, Rigid Body Physics , which should have been simple but ended up with me seeking help on  Reallusion's Forums. If you're interested in iClone and was wondering how hard it is to learn then that's what this series is about, my experience of learning iClone 5 using Reallusion's Quick Fix Video Tutorials . Click the following links for Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 . If you're just looking to learn iClone then skip this and try the tutorials for yourself as this series is not a how to guide for iClone 5. The Rigid Body Physics tutorial demonstrates how to construct a simple car crash into a stack of barrels. Everything is set to the default settings so it's mostly a case of just dragging the relevant barrel props onto the stage a...

I've been blogging my progress at learning Reallusion's iClone 5 . This post I'll be looking at the next 3 tutorials in Reallusion's iClone, Quick Fix Tutorial series . If you haven't read my previous posts, click these links for Part 1 and Part 2 . Remember these blogs are simply my progress at learning the software and are not tutorials in themselves. I would recommend you watch the actual tutorial series if learning iClone 5 is what you really want to do. Customizing Motion Parts 1 and 2 The next Tutorial is titled Layering Animation Part 1 and looks at using the Body Puppet panel from which you can directly control your actors using your mouse (just like an actual puppet) or create customized motions by adjusting sliders for different settings. Creating a custom walk using the sliders in iClone's Body Puppet panel. There's not much to say about this tutorial. It's really just a case of bringing up the panel and messing around with the settings to ...

Jimmy the Superhero by Gary Pye. Reallusion announced the winners of their Animation@Work contest this week. I was fortunate enough to take away one of the three Best Video prizes up for grabs with my promotional video for my new Animation 4 Business Premium Service . I'm now the proud owner of a copy of Magix Movie Edit 2014 Premium Edition software. Whilst I was obviously hoping for the major prize, there are indeed a lot of talented CrazyTalk Animator users out there. Watch the Competition, winner announcement video for a good cross section and preview of all the winning entries. I did pretty well considering I only started learning CTA2 properly last December. Whilst there were many great entries I was very happy to see the winner, Garry Pye, won with a very funny video about Superhero Training. Regular readers and viewers of my work will know that Superheroes is a recurring theme. Gary is also a fellow Aussie and creates content packs for CTA that you can purchase for use in...

Today I decided to run through the next two of Reallusion's iClone 5, Quick Fix Tutorials, How to create my own character and How to create a talking character . Both tutorial videos are very short so click the links if you'd like to watch them. BTW: If you haven't read Part 1 in this series, it's not critical but you will see my first iClone scene and will be able to read how it was constructed. As mentioned previously this series is my experiences of learning iClone and is not intended as a tutorial. If that's what you're looking for then I'd recommend you watch the tutorial videos I'm using as a basis for these blog posts. Creating My Own Character Photo of me used as the basis of my iClone Avatar. As someone who casts myself into a lot of my own videos it's always useful having an avatar character that represents me. So that's what I decided to create. Initially I started with a photo of me that was well lit but my face was not directly fac...

With iClone 6 (check out the embeded video at the bottom of this post) currently in development and me having bought iClone 5.51 in December of last year I thought it was time to start learning the software. Especially now that my confidence with Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 2 is much higher and in a more stable place. Note that if you've found this post expecting tutorials, I'm sorry, you won't find them here. This is my journey and experience of learning iClone 5.5 for anyone who may be interested in buying the software but aren't sure if it's going to be too hard to learn. This will probably turn into a series of articles as I'm writing it during my process of learning and not after the fact. I can only write about what I've learned. If you do have iClone 5.51 and want to follow along I'll be working my way through iClone 5's series of Quick Fix starter videos . From Reallusion's website: iClone 5.51 is a real-time 3D animation too...