Creating a G3 Monkey Character for CrazyTalk Animator 3 (Part 2)

Reddy the Color Monkey
A CTA3, G3 Custom Character.

Last post, I wasn't sure I'd get this far so soon, but, as it turns out, creating a CrazyTalk Animator 3, G3 character is a much easier and relatively more enjoyable task than creating the previous G2 Characters.

In just under two weeks I've completed Reddy, the Color Monkey, my very first, fully Rigged G3 Character

By fully rigged I mean he has all the sprites needed for a full range of facial expressions and hand positions. He also has an extra foot sprite so you can position his feet either facing forward or sideways.

Additionally, his tail is a separate G3 spine character that you link to his hip bone. This means that his tail can be fully articulated and animated using key frames or spine motions.

Currently he has a few issues to fix that are only noticeable once you start moving him around (hence the reason for not showing him animated just yet) but these are minor, mostly cosmetic problems.

Overall, from start to this point, I've worked on Reddy for 19 hours proving my theory that you can create a G3 character in the space of a couple of days. Obviously my 19 hours was spread out over a couple of weeks, working anywhere from 1-5 hours per day.

Rigging the character took less than a couple of hours. The majority of the work was drawing and preparing all the images. It was nice to import the photoshop template into CrazyTalk Animator 3 and just have it work with no unexpected issues (unlike the G2 template)

I actually gave myself an extra step in the creation process because I put all my outlines on separate layers in ClipPaint Studio so I could draw them as vectors, and so it would be easier to change the color red to blue then green (for Reddy's brothers, Bluey, and Greensbury). This line art layers all had to be combined with the color layers before I imported the template into CTA3.

Drawing the hand, mouth, and eye sprites.

Hopefully by my next post I'll have a sample animation so you can see Reddy in action.

Next I need to do a 315 degree view (usually referred to as a three quarter view) of Reddy for when he needs to walk to the left or right. I'm hoping this will be a little less work as I should be able to adapt some of the sprites from this front facing view to save time.

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