Sat, Oct 19, 10:52 PM CDT

12 Weeks With Cartoon Animator 5 - Week 2

Mar 02, 2023 at 07:30 pm by gToon

This is the second of a series of articles over the next 12 weeks that will cover my research and learning about the 2D animation program Cartoon Animator 5 created by Reallusion. I will share my learning journey including any problems or issues that occur. My end goal is to help you understand what you can do with Cartoon Animator 5 and perhaps try it out yourself. You can read the first week's article here. 

Last week we went over what CTA 5 is and its developmental history. This week we’ll briefly look at installing the program, and the interface and jump right into a short project.
 
Reallusion Hub
Installation is pretty straightforward. I recommend downloading the Reallusion Hub application that controls and organizes all of your Reallusion products. You can download it at this link. Reallusion recently updated its Hub application and made it much more attractive and easy to use.
Lots of free resources for Cartoon Animator 5

Free Resources for CTA 5
Once you’ve downloaded and installed CTA 5, you’ll be prompted to start the content manager (on the right side of the screen). The Smart Content Manager will sync to your Reallusion account and prompt you to download the free resources that Reallusion has provided for you. It’s a lot of cool stuff, so be patient while it downloads. When a pack of content hasn’t been downloaded it is black & white, but once you download the content it turns to a color folder.

The interface is pretty standard with a central viewer (your camera) a row of controls on the top and left of the screen and the smart content manager and content controls on the right side At the bottom (press F3) you’ll see the timeline. Rather than go through all of the components of the interface, here’s an intro video to Cartoon Animator 5 which is part of the “Learn” section of their website.
 
Workflow and Creation Concepts
CTA 5 works essentially using the drag-and-drop method. You choose the content you want to create, select it, then drag and drop it into the central creation area. For example, if we want to start with a scene or background, we'd go to the asset area on the right-hand side of the interface, choose the "Scene" tab, then click on the background you want to use (Classroom, Rock, Stage, Forest, et al.). You drop this asset into the work area at the center and the background appears. If we then want to add a character we follow the same steps: choose "Actor"/"Human"/"G3 Human" and then the character you want to use. Drop it into the scene and you have your new character in front of the background scene you've just created. 
Background scene and character
From this point, it's just a matter of choosing what you want to do with your scene/character and then looking through the various sections of CTA 5 to find the action you want to take (add animation, lighting, props, etc). You can search for the specific content you want in the "Content" section to the right of the workspace. Note that you can also switch tabs at the bottom of this section from Content to Scene. The Scene tab shows you what is actually in the scene you are working on. This is convenient because you can group content or select content here as well as clicking on them. 
 
The "Getting Started with CTA 5" intro video below will take you through the workflow process in more detail. It's what I used to get started with. Kai, the narrator, is an excellent teacher and we'll be sharing many videos he's created over the years for Cartoon Animator. 
Next Week: We create our first animated scene
Tags: 2D Animation cartoon animator cartoon animator 5 reallusion
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