This is the seventh of a series of articles over 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 covered the Motion Live Link for CTA 5 along with the process of converting 3D motion to a 2D actor. That episode sets us up for the project we'll be working on for the next six weeks.
Starting a New Cartoon Animator Project
For the second half of this 12-week series, I'll be working on a personal creative project using CTA 5. I've decided to move away from my original project of Vector character creation and, instead, try out a Monty Python-style animation scene (short). I'm doing this mostly because there are so many tutorials at Reallusion and on YouTube that covers the vector character creation process, but literally nothing on creating a stop-motion-style animation.
I don't plan on re-creating the Terry Gilliam stop-motion scenes, but rather I want to create a series of wordless (but not animation-less) scenes based on my recent reading of the great woodcut artist, Frans Masreel's, Passionate Journey. His "wordless novels" we the precursors of the modern graphic novel. I like that his work owes very much to silent films.
So, the goal is to prep for the project by doing research and then deciding on a style. In addition, I plan on using the main character in Passionate Journey (a young man), but adjusting his look in Gimp to look more modern. Then I will create a bone structure for three versions of the character: a front look, a side look and a one-quarter look. CTA 5 has a nice setup for creating bones using these three poses and I'm looking forward to the process.
A word on copyright: since this is a teaching series, my small use of a Masreel character is covered under fair use. Plus, Passionate Journey was published in 1919 which makes it free of copyright. FYI
Getting Started - Research and Photo Editing
It's not hard to find copies of Passionate Journey. I picked up a Dover reprint that has good-quality images reproduced. God, I'd love to see the original published in German in a very small print run (60 copies, I think). In the picture above you can see my character on the right-hand side. This is the front-facing version of Jack Mas (that's what I'm calling him). I had to use Photopea (my image editor of choice) to reproduce his left arm and right leg. I also spent time removing the white colors within his body. I also think his arms are perhaps a bit too long compared to the size of his body, so I'll probably shorten them just a bit.
Also, I need to clean up the edges and smooth out his outline a bit in Photopea, just so he looks more uniform on both sides of his body. And I'm thinking perhaps I could re-color his suit in shades of dark gray. I also need to comb through the book to find various expressions I can use in different scenes. The result, after about an hour of work, is below. Hello Jack Mas!
Rigging the Jack Mas character
There's a good tutorial in the Reallusion learning center on Creating a G3 SVG Character in Illustrator that points toward a somewhat buried post in the Reallusion wiki that provides an outline of the rigging process and provides a temp layered .svg file for use in CTA 5. I don't own Illustrator, but Reallusion does provide a Photopea template for the rigging process, so that will save me some time.
I have to put the Jack Mas character in a T-pose, which I will do in Photopea. Then I'll have to separate the various parts of the actor so that it will correspond to our imported dummy actor. Rather than go through the process for you, I'll share the excellent video tutorial on this process below.
Next Week: Finish the front-facing character rig for Jack
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