This is the tenth 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 I made progress in learning how to rig a .psd character, but the result looked pretty bad. I vowed to continue to develop my rigging skills so I could start on the short 2D film I want to make using a Monty-Python-style.
Why is 2D Character Rigging Hard for Me?
This week I continued to work on creating a good bone rig for my Jack character. I started over from scratch. This time I was very careful to cut the various segments of Jack's body into separate parts (i.e. Head, RArm, RHand, etc) and label them according to the naming conventions Reallusion requires. This took several hours and eventually, when I imported the .pad file of Jack and applied the bone rig carefully, I thought I had succeeded. I applied a standing animation to the character and ended up with this disaster.
I'm not sure why the character breaks up like this. Somehow the various parts are not connected. I tried the import and bone creation process again from scratch but ended up with a similar awful result. At some point, I'm making a mistake that throws the actor into a tailspin.
I started to think that perhaps my bone rig was too complicated, so I simplified it. But, again, the result was not good. And it's not the CTA 5 program as I have watched several tutorials that get the process correct. And I'm not sure why I can't seem to get it right as I'm pretty good at learning from tutorials and instructions.
I'm thinking that this is just one of those things that come up when you are working on something that's creative that just stops your progress. Not a good situation for a project that reports weekly. This may be one of those situations where it's going to take several months for me to get it right.
I'm going to keep working on the rigging process and I hope to finally get it right.
Working on the Background Scenes
One aspect of production that I can get right is developing the look of the background scenes. I thought at first to simply use cut-out art that I have scanned (still a good option), but it suddenly occurred to me that it might be interesting to create scenes using AI Generators. I used language like "Black and White", "In the style of Frans Masreel", and "train arriving in the station" to generate the scenes you see below.
I think these scenes are very useful. You can see that it would be easy to cut out an original actor and replace him with Jack. Add sound effects like a train arriving at the station from freesound.org, and add a little pan of the camera along with a very simple Jack actor animation (moving head perhaps). Add a title shot after the scene saying, "ARRIVAL", and you've got the first scene of the film. I've been thinking of basing it one my first experience traveling alone to a big city. We'll see how it goes.
Next Week: More learning how to rig. Fingers crossed.
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