Animation and Video Life

MOHO 13's New Character Set. Smith Micro released MOHO 13 , their all in one, 2D animation studio, this week. The question is should you buy or upgrade to the latest version? Obviously I've already spoiled this in the title, so the actual question is why do I think you should buy or upgrade? To be clear, I'm only talking about MOHO 13 Pro. If you're considering MOHO 13 Debut be aware that you're missing out on some of the new features, and a lot of existing features that are only available in the Pro version. Debut is fine if the budget doesn't stretch to Pro, but, if you never want to be disappointed about not having a feature, it's Pro or nothing! The other thing I need to be transparent about is I'm not, by any stretch, a frequent MOHO user/animator. However I took the time to learn MOHO 12 Pro fairly extensively, blogging about my process and sorting out 104 free MOHO training videos into a logical viewing order in the process. I think I ha...

A more efficient way to export audio clips from a single audio track using Audacity. As an Independent Animator you may often find yourself recording all the dialogue for every character in your script yourself. Or, if you work with multiple voice artists, you may get a single audio file from each artist containing all of their character's dialogue only. If you intend to use either of those recordings to trigger an automatic lip syncing feature such as the one found in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 you're going to need to split the audio up into smaller clips. I use Audacity to edit my audio and, if you do too, I'm sure you've probably done the laborious, manually select each clip, and export to a separate audio file. It's a process that's fine, it works, and it gets the job done. However you're probably doing it that way because, like me, you've never really bothered to deep dive on Audacity's very powerful features. There is a ...

Garry Pye's Spy Guys for Cartoon Animator 4 Ever since winning Reallusion's Animation@Work competition back in 2014 Garry Pye has been a strong supporter of, and leading content creator for, CrazyTalk Animator 2, 3, and now Cartoon Animator 4 (A.K.A. CrazyTalk Animator 4). So much so that Garry's Online store Garry Pye Creations is quite possibly the second biggest store for CrazyTalk/Cartoon Animator content after Reallusion's own Content Store and Marketplace . Garry's Little Mates Characters  for CTA 3 have been hugely successful with more than 60 different characters available. Since then Garry has followed up the Little Mates with a new character series, The Bendies . Initially created for CTA3, all bendies released after the launch of CA4 in April have been designed with the new 360 head system, and facial puppetry compatibility (something that hasn't been a feature in the Little Mates range). The Bendies series differ in that they feature n...

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996. It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it. But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm ). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs . Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures , and Toon Hair , designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker. The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that w...