Animation and Video Life

3D CC3 TET Character, based on my Oppa Doll Avatar, used as the base for a 2D CA4 character. One of my favorite things to do is to create characters with any type of Avatar/Character creator app. In fact the first test I usually try with these tools is, can I make an avatar of me (or at least my The Extraordinary Tourist persona). Previously I've used 2D character creators like Oppa Doll as a source of artwork for some characters I've made for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 animation studio but 2D character creators are limited to... well 2D. 3D Character Creators While you may think 3D character creators have no place in creating characters for 2D animation there are quite a number of advantages including: No drawing skills required. Render characters in any style. Use an art filter or even hand trace into line art. Need to animate the character in a specific pose or angle? Render out an image of the character in the required angle and animate it in 2D. Quicker to crea...

Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 used to support vector images in a big way back when it was launched as CrazyTalk Animator 2 . So much so that they built into the application a Render Styles system that made it simple to recolor vector images if you took the extra few steps to create vector color groupings for your G2 vector characters and props. Unfortunately G2 Vector characters proved to be too difficult for the average user to make, and it also required access to Adobe Flash (now Animate CC) for which many users weren't willing to invest in a subscription. Things haven't been helped by Flash being phased out as a web standard format in December 2020 either. While CrazyTalk Animator 3 , and now Cartoon Animator 4 , have surged ahead focusing more on high resolution bitmaps to create quality characters and props, the Render Styles system and support for vector images still remains. Except the only vector file supported is Adobe's SWF format. Reallusion's Ignores...

BlueStacks Android Emulator for PC or Mac. There are many free and low cost mobile animation productivity apps for Android in the Google Play Store that would fit right into your workflow if you could access them directly from your PC/Mac  desktop (or laptop) computer. Even if those apps can save their output to the same cloud storage you use with your PC or Mac, just the divide of using a separate device makes them inconvenient and disruptive. Worse yet, what if your Android device is underpowered for the apps you want to use, or worse still you don't own any Android devices because someone convinced you Apple Mac's, iphones, and ipads are 'cool' (they are, but you pay for 'cool'). BlueStacks is a free, open source Android emulator for Windows or Mac (currently only BlueStacks 4 can be installed on a Mac but BlueStacks 5 for Mac is coming soon). If you're not aware of what an emulator is, it's basically a piece of software that mimics another devices ...