Skip to main content

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

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 works as both a male or female pre teen), eleven hair style bases, with thirteen hair additions for further variation.

There are five head shapes with several variations for eyes, nose, and lip treatments and two different PBR skin textures too (one plain and one with some detail such as makeup).

Detailed breakdown of the various
character head/face options.

Those of you with a sharp eye for detail may notice a severe lack of cultural diversity in this line up. Which doesn't mean you're stuck with white characters only, it'll just take a bit more effort to change skin tones and other features to what you need.

My attempt at a non-white toon character. This hair
is not included in the Toon hair pack.

That's the beauty of Reallusion's Character Creator. Even though you may start with these body morphs you're not limited to what they have to offer. Mix it up with other body morphs and settings inside CC itself.

There's no actual character outfits included in the pack (like I said it's a bare bones starter pack for toon characters) but you can dress your characters in whatever outfits you have in your CC content library. Unfortunately that does mean you may have to work at toning down the realistic textures and styles. Hopefully Reallusion will release some additional Toon packs in the future with outfits and accessories designed in similar style.

A sample of hairstyles from
the Toon Hairs pack.
I also hope they'll release additional hairs for toon characters too. Whilst this first pack is a really good start it leans heavily toward more feminine styles once you include all the hair additions. As well, the male hairs are all quite modern styles. It would be nice to see a few more classic, timeless styles for men. Not all men fill their hair with 'product' (just sayin').

Overall, Reallusion's Cartoon Character Designer Bundle for Character Creator 3 is a welcome addition to my own CC3/iClone7 library. It makes it very quick to whip up a variety of toon style characters in a short time and they blend well with other body morphs and settings in CC3 for even more variety of design.

I certainly hope they'll prove popular for Reallusion because it would be great to see the range extended with more body morphs, outfits, and even scenes and props in the toon style.

Comments

  1. What hair did you use for the black character you created. I did figure out that just turning the brightness to -50 gets you a nice brown tone. Curious of the settings you used and any other recommendation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The hair comes from the stylized 'Slacker' character that comes with CC3 as part of the learning resources. It's just called 'Slacker_Hair'. If you have it it'll be in the top menu of the Hair folder.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. All I did was select the Materials tab, select the skin material you want to change from the list, right click on the base color, and select 'Adjust Color' from the menu that comes up. From there adjust the brightness and contrast sliders to whatever shade you need.

      Delete
  3. Wow. Amazing! Who doesn't love the Pixar look, right? It's so dreamy. Probably the best animation to feed your eyes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I just like it because it's kind of midway between 2D drawings and film. You still get that cartoon style but you can picture the characters walking around in the real world too - sort like your action figures coming to life.

      Delete

Post a Comment

This blog is monitored by a real human. Generic or unrelated spam comments with links to sites of dubious relativity may be DELETED.

I welcome, read, and respond to genuine comments relating to each post. If your comment isn't that save me some time by not posting it.

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme and How You Can Use It For 2D Animated Character Turnarounds

360 Microwave Meme Stills from PixVerse. The center images are the original character images used to generate the turnarounds. T ikTok art drama, where wannabe artists, who have no clue about professional art practices, but are still happy to gatekeep their idea of how professional artists work, is reason enough to stay off the platform. I have no doubt there are a few insufferable professionals on there gatekeeping too. Case in point, TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme , which I discovered through a suggested video on YouTube called, The Microwave Art Drama Breaking the Art Community on TikTok by art drama showcaser, Mohammed Agbadi . Apparently TikTok's animation community is livid that using this effect on your 2D character to achieve a fully animated, 360 degree turnaround, is just the absolute lowest thing you can do. You cannot, in good conscience, call yourself an artist, or an animator, if you do this, and, even worse, post it on TikTok. In retaliation 'real' artist/...

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...

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...

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?

Dollars Mocap: Full Body Webcam Motion Capture (Including Hands and Fingers) For iClone and Cartoon Animator

Even though I should be further away from the camera Dollars Mocap MONO still does a good job of  tracking my arms, hands and fingers. Ever since I wrote my series on becoming a VTuber , discovering it was possible to do full body motion capture, including hands and fingers, with just software and a webcam, I've been on the look out for any motion capture software that can bring that functionality to Cartoon Animator. Dollars Mocap is a low cost motion capture application with a free trial that I learned about through the YouTube Channel Digital Puppets  and their test video . It can record full body, upper body, arms and hands, and facial mocap from a live video source or pre-recorded video. Investigating further, I discovered not only does Dollars Mocap have a free iClone7, iClone8 character profile file download (look for it at the bottom of the main program download page), so you can use the saved motions with iClone8, they've also got a demo video for how to convert your...