Several years ago I purchased CrazyTalk Animator and while I had fun using it, I was never really able to put it to practical use. With the release of Cartoon Animator 4, Reallusion is hoping to make authoring animated characters even more robust.
Taking a quick peek at a recent CreativeBloq review would lead you to believe that this tool is the easiest tool on the market for round-trip design production. Having seen several applications claim this over the years including Adobe’s own Character animator, I was interested to see how the product has evolved.
With a more advanced set of features the product is priced at a reasonable $99 for the Pro version. CrazyTalk Animator also came in two different flavors as does this one (Pipeline and Pro), with the Pro being fine for individuals looking to extend Photoshop, Clip-Studio Paint, or Affinity Designer.
The “killer features” or what makes this product unique in my mind are the dead simple Bones effects to control character movement and the Z-depth control, enabling you to do some pretty sophisticated parallax scrolling with it. The Bones tool comes with varios presets for how humanoid characters would behave, which saves a ton of time
And with the Z-depth feature, you can explode out the various sections of a background scene into its respective layers, affording some really fun and interesting effects.
While most of my work consists of UI animations and micro-interactions as of late, for content creators who are looking to extend their skillset into content publication via animation, Cartoon Animator 4 could be for them. They’ve got a trial on the website which is available for both Mac & PC.
CreativeBloq’s article is an “Advertisement feature” therefore take it with a grain of salt. I can say having used the earlier version of this product that it was easy to use, fun, and worked well with Photographs. I’m looking forward to giving the trial a try.