This is the ninth 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 was awful. I started the process of rigging my Jack character and had disaster after disaster. Not because of the Cartoon Animator, but because of Photopea and my unfamiliarity with it's workflow and save process. This week, however, worked many hours to learn Photopea (a good, free svg editor recommended by Reallusion) and the various ways to rig a character in Cartoon Animator 5.
Progress with 2D Character Rigging
This week was much better in terms of making progress with the rigging workflow and finally getting a character close to being rigged. I do understand why 2D and 3D character riggers often complain that the process is tedious and, at times, frustrating. Indeed it is. I spent at least 5 hours putting my first rigging together after last week's disaster, but the end result was far from satisfactory. Still, I see it as progress as I'm much more comfortable with the process now. So, here's what I worked on this week.
Two Methods to Rig a 2D Character in CTA 5
I spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand how Photopea works and made great progress. I realized that some of the problems I had last week were due to the fact that I use poor naming conventions for files I saved. I cleared out all of the useless saves and started fresh with good folder structure and naming conventions. Now I know where everything I save is going to.
There are two methods to rig a character in CTA 5: one, is to divide your character up into pieces then use a dummy character provided by Reallusion to simply substitute each piece with your own character. It seems on the surface to be clear-cut, but in practice, there are several problems.
First, is that while replacing the sprites (pieces of your character like lower arm, left hand, etc), the tutorials show that you can replace the piece "in place" so that it goes exactly where the dummy part goes. This didn't show up for me no matter how hard I looked for the check box to do this with. So, when I imported each part they were in some other location in the scene and had to be re-sized to fit the character. This made for a rough process that ended up with a poor result (see above).
I'm sure this check box is there somewhere, but I'll have to wait till next week to figure it out. And that's part of the rigging process frustration. You encounter one issue and have to spend a half hour correcting it in order to progress.
The second method to rig is faster, but the end result has almost as many problems as the first method (see below). In this case, you simply import your whole character either as svg or png file and then create a bone rig for it without cutting the character up into pieces. It's much faster and is simple to do.
The problem is that the rigging morphs the body into strange positions because each bone controls a larger section of the body that the first method. It's possible to bone the character so that this problem is much less pronounced, but I didn't have time for it as I want to move on.
Despite frustrating results, I'm actually positive about getting a good rig for my character, Jack. By making mistakes and coming up with poor results, I'm learning the rigging process and feel much more confident. Keep in mind, the problems are not due to Cartoon Animator, but to my own skills (or lack of them).
Next Week: Get the rigging done and move on
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