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.

Comments

Inochi2D - Free Open Source 2D VTuber Avatar Rigging and Puppeteering Software (Part 1)

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...

LTX Studio (Beta): AI-Powered Visual Storytelling, From Script to Screen in One App.

LTX Studio can generate consistent characters across storyboard panels - even if one character is a dragon! W hile text to image, and text to video (and image to video) AI tend to be getting a lot of the press, the real exciting aspect of generative AI implementation is how it can be used to speed up creator workflow. Being able to realize your creative vision in a shorter length of time can lead to more ambitious projects. Particularly if you're a team of one, with a very limited budget, but you one day dream of creating your own epic animated feature film. LTX Studio (beta), a new 'all-in-one' AI film making tool, is not going to let you realize that dream from a single text prompt but, by bringing a bunch of generative AI technologies together, the developers have created a one platform workflow that can help anyone rapidly visualize and deliver a story from initial idea to finished film in days rather than weeks (depending upon how ambitious the project is). Even bette...

Review: Toon Boom Harmony 14 - What I learned in 21 Days

Toon Boom Harmony is widely considered the industry standard for primarily 2D animation. You don't get to be that if your software isn't exceptional. However, industry standard and exceptional usually translates to steep learning curve and probably contains more features than I'll ever use. So, in reviewing the latest version, Harmony 14, I'm setting out to answer two questions; How easy is it to learn the basics and is it software an independent artist/animator, like myself, should seriously consider as their go to, 2D animation studio of choice?

Krita AI Diffusion - Generative Image AI For Krita is Seriously Useful, Powerful and Free (If You Can Install it Locally)

Generative AI sequence of a woman in a business suit. From sketch to refined image using Krita AI Diffusion - by TET G enerative image AI, where you describe an image with a text prompt to an Artificial Intelligence model and it produces a new image based on your prompt, is gaining a strong hold as a tool for many artists. Krita AI Diffusion brings generative AI image tools right into your favourite free and opensource, graphics editor, Krita. Not only that, if you have a computer with decent specs (and at least 10GB of hard drive space), Krita AI Diffusion is completely free. What If I Don't Have a Powerful Computer? If you're in my situation, with a computer that was around before anyone in the mainstream had even heard of generative AI, you can still access Krita AI Diffusion for free, using a cloud based AI server, Interstice and 300 tokens, to get you started. Once your initial tokens run out, purchase 5000 more for 10€ (approx US$11.00). Tokens never expire. I would...

Plask - Free, Brower Based, Motion Capture Using Only a Webcam

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...

The Ultimate Independent Animator's App and Resource List - Animation and Video Life

Image created with Cartoon Animator 4. Being an independent animator is not like a studio animation job. There's so much more to do that is indirectly related to the actual task of animating. Over the years I've sought out many apps, tools, and services that can help me achieve that one single task, expressing myself through animation. Below is my Ultimate Independent Animator's Resource List for 2024 (last updated Oct 2024). It started out as a list of free or low cost apps that could help you in every stage of producing either 2D or 3D animation, and then just kind of grew from there. You may not have been looking for a Time Management App as much as you needed something to get you started in 3D animation but when those commissioned projects start coming in you'll have a head start on maximizing your time. All the apps and services on this list had to meet two main criteria: They had to be useful and relevant to an Indy Animator/artist. The base app/se...

Glif (Alpha) - Make Your Own Tiny AI Powered Niche Image Generator Apps

I first heard about Glif through a YouTube video that mentioned you could get access to Flux Pro (the latest 'game changer AI' generative image model) through the site for free. While I had a vague notion from the video of what Glif was, I wasn't expecting it to be so easy to get started with, and so good with my very first results. Glif is an easy to use, low-code platform for creating tiny AI-powered generators called Glifs. While that may not sound inspiring, what Glifs allow you to do is create a tiny app that niches down to a specific type of AI generation that the user modifies with their own inputs. The best way to really understand is with an example. My First Glif I've recently been using VivaGo's AI platform (free and unlimited at the time of writing) to consistently generate full body characters in a front facing T-Pose that I can rig as front facing characters in Cartoon Animator. Unfortunately it can be a bit hit or miss maintaining the T-Pose part...

Animation and Video Life

Search This Blog