Adobe Character Animator Tutorials
Jun 20, 2016 Adobe Character Animator is a performance capture animation tool that is part of After Effects CC. It takes Photoshop and Illustrator files, and allows you. Nov 02, 2016 In Character Animator, choose File Import and select freda.psd to create a puppet. Select Freda in the Project panel and click the Add to New Scene button. The puppet is automatically opened in the Scene panel and selected in the Timeline panel. Start with a character. Build your character from scratch in Illustrator or Photoshop — or start with one of the puppets already available in Character Animator. Animations with legs — and arms and heads. Getting your character to move doesn’t take a lot of work. Control gestures like waving with your keyboard. Character Animator (CA) is a new application by Adobe, that allows you to easily animate characters, using a webcam, a microphone and a set of simple to use tools. It is a wonderful program for creating character driven short animations, explainer videos, presentations and many more. Characterizer is a feature in Adobe Character Animator that turns your face into a stylized animated character in a few minutes. This tutorial walks through the capture process, applying and customizing an art style, generating your characters into Character Animator, and how to add your own custom styles.
Character Animator Free
Even the simplest-looking animations on TV or in the movies require talented illustrators, skilled technicians, and time—a lot of time. For instance, one 30-minute episode of The Simpsons can take months to create. On May 15, 2016, The Simpsons broke through that barrier when Homer Simpson answered audience questions in real time. Homer’s instant animation was powered by easy-to-use Adobe Character Animator software. If you’re inspired to try Character Animator yourself, read on for tips and tutorials.
Character Animator is installed on your computer as part of After Effects CC. (A Creative Cloud paid membership includes After Effects. If you’re not a paid member, you can download a trial version of After Effects for free.) You need just two more things to make your own animations:
Welcome back to our Character Animator tutorial series! Today we will start an exciting new topic – Behaviors. The Behaviors are one of the most important features of Character Animator, they can help you create great looking animation in an easy and fun way. This time we will look at two Behaviors – Dragger and Dangle. If you have followed our last tutorial, right now you may be thinking to yourself- but wait, weren’t Dragger and Dangle tools?
- Layered Photoshop or Illustrator file
- Computer with a webcam and microphone, or external webcam and mic
“Character Animator relies on a layered .PSD or .AI file that has body parts on different layers in a specific way,” explains David Simons, the senior principal scientist who heads the product team. “It can take a short amount of time to set up the layered file or even less time if you start with one of our downloadable template example files and replace the existing art with your own.”
Character Animator
For the quickest start, check out those example files and accompanying instructions. In no time, you’ll be animating a character (or “puppet,” in Character Animator parlance) simply by moving your head and speaking. The software has sophisticated face-tracking and lip-synching, which is why you need a webcam. The mic is for recording dialog.
For Homer’s live Q&A, the Simpsons team didn’t use face-tracking because they didn’t want the character to move like Dan Castellaneta, the actor who voices Homer. Instead, they used keyboard commands to trigger Homer’s actions. You’ll probably want to stick with Character Animator’s face-tracking and lip-synching, but as you become more familiar with the process, keyboard commands are a great way to add actions. Explore the actions in the example files; for example, you can toggle between a human head and a monster head in the werewolf puppet.
MAKE YOUR OWN CHARACTERS
Eventually, you’ll want to build a puppet from scratch, but what if you’re not artistically inclined?“Import photos into Photoshop to use as your character,” suggests Simons. The results can look like a stop-motion animation, and the process will be much faster than traditional stop-motion. Simons recommends two related tutorials: “Adobe Character Animator Meets Stop Motion” and “Drama at the Cookies.”