My name is Warwick Hays and I’ve been creating content for Cartoon Animator for many years now. I am a featured content developer on the Reallusion’s Content Store and I love combining 2D with 3D assets to make things a little different.
I created the above video with the help of Reallusion’s ActorCore, iClone and Cartoon Animator. So let’s run through how I did it.
Serg Pilypencos
For many years, artist Serg Pilypencos has specialized in vector graphics as a content contributor to online sites with his unique visual style. Providing custom orders for illustrations, banner designs, and others.
While currently working to create more characters, assets and content for the Cartoon Animator community and 2D Marketplace, Serg took time out to talk to Reallusion about his passion and projects.
“Cartoon Animator is easy even without a lot of experience in animation.”
Serg Pilypencos / 2D Content Developer
Read More “Vector Graphic Specialist brings High Quality Content to Cartoon Animator”
Maru Nihoniho
Hi my name is Maru Nihoniho and I’m the founder of Metia Interactive a games studio based in Auckland, New Zealand. As a games designer and producer my focus is on indigenous storytelling as culture-based stories are hugely influential and are a powerful outlet for engagement and learning. I have designed several projects that tell Māori stories. They have been produced to engage and inspire our younger generations and a great way to connect everyone to our culture as well.
Our biggest story development to date is a fictional story called Guardian Maia. It is a story we have designed that incorporates the mythology of the Māori culture. The story follows the journey of a young woman named Maia through a dystopian New Zealand. The first part of the story Guardian Maia Episode One is currently released as interactive fiction on the App Store and Google Play with the conclusion being released in early 2021.
Since releasing our story, we have looked at ways to bring the story to life. Our first step was to create imagery including storyboards which then led into the idea of creating an animation. Our challenge was to find a pipeline to help us develop an animation efficiently with a small team. We found that the Character Creator and iClone Pipeline met our needs and provided the essential tools to create our animation and yet be flexible enough to allow us to bring in other assets into the project if needed. Through the animation process, we realized that using the Character Creator and iClone software with the Unreal Engine a real potential to build a game prototype existed; that will be our next project to work on as soon as our animation is finished.
“Easy to use, flexible, timesaving describes our experience with the Character Creator, iClone and Unreal Live Link pipelines. A great solution for quickly creating and bringing content to life especially so for a small team like ours. The Reallusion products are now an essential part of our design and development pipeline.”
Maru Nihoniho – Founder & Managing Director of Metia Interactive
Hi, I’m Chris and I wanted to show how you can use Cartoon Animator and After Effects as an ideal pipeline to create broadcast quality children’s animations, in the same genre as Peppa Pig, Hey Duggie, and lots of other hugely successful shows.
I’ve worked in Home Entertainment for 15+ years, in both the US and the UK, and worked on projects for Warner Brothers, Disney, BBC, Paramount, and many other studios. The most time of which being at Abbey Home Media who was the UK’s leading independent home entertainment company for lots of well-known children’s shows, Care Bears, Topsy and Tim, Peter Rabbit, Sooty, Horrid Henry, Fireman Sam and more.
Working on these brands gave me a good grounding on what children want, what needs to be included, along with what works.
The design of your characters needs to fit the branding of your show and suit the target audience. Everything I make is for preschool children, so, for characters:
And for the stories, try to include:
These always seem to be a popular combination for children and parents too.
I use Cartoon Animator to animate. Although I’ve used After Effects for over 15 years, the character rigging, DUIK / Joysticks / sliders and more have always confused me. Others might say how easy they are to use – but for me, I just couldn’t get them to work correctly!
The reasons why I think Cartoon Animator is by far the best software are simple:
I love designing content for children, coming up with stories and brands, but I can’t animate. With Cartoon Animator, that’s no problem at all. The reason being, there are lots of ready-made motions that you can use and have an animated sequence in no time. You can of course keyframe your own motions, or use motion capture in Cartoon Animator. But, one of the beautiful things about Cartoon Animator is the ability to use ready-made motions that can be easily retargeted to different characters, each with its own different body shape and size.
The pipeline I use is:
Design in Photoshop, animate in Cartoon Animator, and then export the project to After Effects via the plugin to do the final compositing. This makes the workflow quick and creative.
Cartoon Animator has a pipeline where you easily rig mostly in the animation design process using their universal character skeletons – and it’s easy to understand. For example, you can take one character and quickly update your animation design to make additional characters. In short, it takes away a lot of technical confusion and keeps the creativity fun.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve used After Effects for many many years and it was great when Reallusion added the plugin where you can export from Cartoon Animator to After Effects for additional compositing. All of this means you can easily create a broadcast-quality children’s animated video series in no time.
Right out of the box, Cartoon Animator comes with a selection of templates, humans, and quadruped characters. My main tip here is to study the templates and other characters, see how they are put together, and really study joints and bones to see how they bend a move. Once you understand this, you’re good to go – and can start designing.
Pre-school children are used to seeing things that are cute, so, my style is to keep it cute, simple, and appealing.
One massive highlight of Cartoon Animator is that there are always new features being added, new plugins made available to help with animation (face motion capture, leap motion plugins for hand animation), and plugins for full-body motion capture.
As mentioned earlier, the After Effects plugin is a huge addition – simply click the AE button and then import the .Json file via the After Effects plugin, and all your characters will be brought in as separate sequences, backgrounds, elements, and audio. In After Effects you can then add additional elements – lighting, shadows, footage, anything that really helps you create your animation. It really does help you polish off your final animated video to get it to broadcast quality.
Using this scene as an example, we will demonstrate how PSDs can best be layered inside Cartoon Animator as .ctScene or .ctProject files. This is especially useful when creating artwork. Here is an example of a finished scene created by artist Kel Harper.
Read More “How to create a PSD layered scene for use in Cartoon Animator 4 (CTA4)”
Martin Klekner
Martin Klekner is a freelance director and CG artist from Prague, Czech Republic who is also a Blender specialist, an instructor on CGBoost.com, and an Ancient Greece enthusiast.
Martin has embarked on an ambitious project “Heroes of Bronze” where he will be creating his own CG short film project from the Ancient Greek era, while documenting his workflow and sharing with the audience all the tools that will help them create their own CG projects.
Heroes of Bronze is an upcoming “proof-of-concept” short film set in Ancient Greece, showcasing the magnificence, beauty and horror of the time set between two famous battles of ancient history – Marathon (490 BC) and Plataea (479 BC).
It will be a three minute CG animated short film, using Blender 2.8 and variety of other software, including Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Character Creator and iClone.
“I’m mostly working alone on my personal projects, so I really need to focus on how to automate or make easier, parts of my pipeline. Reallusion tools help me speed up several crucial steps: character mesh creation, texturing, rigging and animation.”
Martin Klekner – Cinematic Director / Blender Specialist
Cris Marchal
Before starting in the world of 3D, Cris studied sculptural techniques for 2 years in art school. After her studies, she decided to follow her dream and took a Master’s Degree in Video Game Art and Design at U-TAD, Spain. Now she works in a company as a 3D Modeler.
Cris found iClone as a catalyst for speedy production. Let’s see her story with Reallusion iClone, Character Creator and Unreal Pipeline.
“The Character Creator Tool allows you to have many unique ‘actors’ for the development of your scenes. This app is perfect for professional studios, as it not only has a myriad of utilities, but is also compatible with various motion capture suits, providing studios with endless possibilities. In short, an excellent tool for your program library.”
Cris Marchal / 3D Modeler
Read More “3D Modeler discovers iClone Real-time Tools for Quick Character Animation”
Reallusion announces a new path for production with the release of the Character Creator 3 Connector for NVIDIA Omniverse™. The new connector adds a complete digital human creation pipeline to the Omniverse Create and Omniverse Machinima applications. Experience the tools now and see it live during NVIDIA GTC, April 12 – 16. At the show, Reallusion will present exclusive sessions, demonstrate, and answer questions about Character Creator Digital Humans for Omniverse. For further information, demos, downloads, and video tutorials for Character Creator 3 and Omniverse visit https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/nvidia-omniverse/
Digital humans and character motions are in constant demand for Media and Entertainment professionals, while the need for digital humans is rising within Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), Manufacturing, Higher Education, and Gaming industries. The common problem has been that character assets are traditionally costly to produce and daunting for non-professionals. Reallusion solves the digital human dilemma with the Character Creator 3 Connector for Omniverse.
The CC3 Connector adds the power of a full character generation system with motions and unlimited creative variations to Omniverse. Professionals of any skill level can leverage the tools to create digital humans for projects with efficiency and without the need to outsource or forego digital humans due to cost or human resource challenges. Enable rapid character creation, choose animations from a vast library of motion capture, or add and edit custom motion with iClone. Transfer characters and motions from Character Creator with the Omniverse Exporter for a solution that is easy to learn and deploy digital humans for Omniverse Create and Omniverse Machinima.
NVIDIA Omniverse is an open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. Complex visual workflows of creators, designers, and engineers are transformed as users and teams connect design tools, assets, and projects for collaborative iteration in a virtual world.
The fundamental representation of assets in Omniverse is Pixar’s open-source Universal Scene Description (USD). USD is much more than a file format and not only just a format for import and export. USD represents rich scene content with an API that enables complex property inheritance, instancing, layering, lazy loading and a wide variety of other key features. Thanks to the USD and Omniverse Nucleus service technology our tools can enable live collaboration with other applications very effectively in NVIDIA Omniverse.
The Character Creator design process provides ultimate flexibility for building a variety of avatars that can truly represent the client’s workforce, in a digital format that reflects their cultural diversity. Character Creator Headshot, SkinGen, and Smart Hair all allow for detailed character definition from head to toe. Reallusion is connecting the complete character creation process to Omniverse.
Character Creator 3 and Omniverse in combination help a variety of industries to access and deploy characters as task performers, virtual hosts, or citizens for simulations and visualizations. AEC can generate digital people to inhabit and interact with designs and buildings, Manufacturing can simulate workforce and training, Educators and researchers can generate digital humans for AI, XR and video game projects. Reallusion is supporting the next generation of digital human solutions for key industry simulation partners and technologies.
Character Creator digital humans can be chosen from a library or custom creation can begin with highly-morphable, fully-rigged bases allowing creators of all skill levels a way to easily design characters from scratch for Omniverse projects. Morphing controls and sliders for 3D face and body make detailed designs possible for an unlimited number of character options for Omniverse.
Creating digital doubles and likenesses is possible without modeling or outsourcing with the Headshot plugin for Character Creator. Through the simplicity of transforming a single photo into a 3D head, CC3 Headshot can build a custom digital human face in minutes.
Design characters with 3D head and 3D face sculpting features that are guided by an easy-to-follow GUI overlay to illustrate the interactive morph regions. Sculpt and shape the body with an extensive list of body morph sliders to fine-tune every section of the character’s shape and size. Achieving realistic or stylized results is possible to match any Omniverse project.
SkinGen is an ultra realistic human skin generator and layer system for creating skin and special skin characteristics from entire looks complete with makeup. Stack and customize layered skin editing, micro normal details and advanced settings for color, age and cosmetics.
Choose animation for Character Creator characters to use in Omniverse by selecting motions from the ActorCore 3D motion marketplace or creating and editing motion and mocap with iClone. The ActorCore motion library offers single motion purchases and volume motion pack discounts. All Character Creator characters are fully compatible with iClone motions and may be transferred with the character USD for Omniverse.
Clothing and accessories finally equip the look for your Omniverse project. Select from an assortment of clothing options, edit and customize, or shop the available content from a myriad of fashion options. Full custom clothing can be produced through compatibility with Pixologic Zbrush, Clo3D Marvelous Designer, Blender, and various Autodesk applications.
Get a first-hand experience of the Character Creator digital humans with these free assets that make it simple to try without the need to download or install any applications. These free files are reflective of the USD and NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) output you can achieve with any CC3 creation for Omniverse.
Link to Reallusion OV landing page http://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/nvidia-omniverse/
Download Character Creator 3
Get the tools to create Omniverse-ready digital humans. Download a full evaluation trial of Character Creator to design custom characters with ease. Learn from free video training to get started with creating digital humans for Omniverse. https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/
Download Omniverse and the CC3 Connector
Get started by downloading the launcher for NVIDIA Omniverse and Character Creator Omniverse Connector. Use the Omniverse Exporter from Character Creator 3 to export and transfer any CC3 character and motion as USD to Omniverse. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/omniverse/
Once you have your first content ready to upload to the 2D Marketplace you will need to download and install the Content Uploader from https://developer.reallusion.com/submit.html . This page also has more detailed information. If you have any questions about this process, please email our 2D Community Manager at garrypye@reallusion.com .
Read More “How to Upload your 2D content to the Reallusion 2D Marketplace”
