This is the eigth 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, started on a new project based on a design from the early 20th century woodcut artist, Frans Masreel. We started a new project by scanning a character from Masreel's, Passionate Journey, wordless novel and were progressing to organize and rig the character for CTA 5 animation
Why does this happen to me?
The work this week was to gather the svg template for the front-facing actor and then make a list of all of the pieces I needed to layer in order to rig my character to animated. There is an excellent tutorial on the process, plus a template provided by Reallusion to aid the workflow.
I began the tedious process of cutting out the various pieces of Jack (rhand, lhand, torso, rcalf, lcalf, head, etc) and place them on separate labeled layers. I needed 15 separate pieces of Jack (see model below). Once that was done and saved as an svg file, I was going to open the template, import the Jack file with all of its layers and then add each piece to the template where appropriate.
I worked for about 3 hours to get all 15 pieces of my Jack actor. I thought I had saved the file, but the next day when I went back to start the process of placing the layers into the template, all of my work was gone. Yikes!
Starting over from scratch (twice)
I looked everywhere for my original file created in Photopea. No question, I did not save my work at the end of my session and Photopea didn't auto-save the work either.
So it's back to the drawing board. I suppose this is a good lesson to learn as a couple of hours of work lost is better than a full day's work lost....I guess.
Starting over, I had the idea that perhaps I could clean up my original scan by fixing small things like balancing the character's right and left sides. The original is unbalanced (which probably adds to the charm of the character), but I like balance. So, I cut the character in two and placed the best (left) side on a separate layer. Then I copied that side, flipped it horizontally, and placed it on a second layer. Once the two sides were joined the figure was balanced, but it did create some other issues like the v-neck being too large. I fixed that and moved on to the head which I've always thought was too small for the body.
Separated the head, pasted into the new body and enlarged it a bit. I did have more fussing to get the white v-neck to look right, but it didn't take long. Here is the final svg Jack character with a transparent background.
Nope.
Once again, the file is missing and can't be found through a search on my Windows machine and I KNOW I saved it. There must be something I'm not understanding about how Photopea saves files. I think perhaps I'm going to do a deep dive search (perhaps I can find my original file?) and if it still doesn't show up, I'm switching to either Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.
A disappointing session this week with two steps back. I hope I can make one step forward next week. Ach....
Next Week: Finish? the front-facing character rig for Jack
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