Sequential Pixel

Digital Inspiration for a Creative World

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Cartoon Animator 4

Screenshot of the Reallusion website featuring Cartoon Animator 4

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

Cartoon Animator 4 User Interface

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.

Layered background broken out into different sections using Cartoon Animator 4

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.

Mobile UI Animation as a Driver to Better Experiences

Woman holding a phone with her left hand and tapping with her right

The thing I appreciate most about Nick Babich’s article on UX Planet entitled “3 Key Uses for Animation in Mobile UI Design” is the liberal use of example animations as a way to communicate core concepts.

When talking about system status, he’s clear to delineate between loaders, refreshes, and notifications – all important aspects for users to understand that the system is still working. There’s the notion of perceived time that Babich seems to capture well with his reference to creative progress indicators.

With regard to Navigations & Transitions, he again brings examples of complementary design, transport effects, relationships. One thing to be mindful of with transitions is Fitt’s Law, which describes (among other things) elements being within the same range as one another. His explanations do a nice job here of that.

And finally, give the user control by providing feedback. While are mobile touchscreens are an abstracted view of the physical world, we should expect to have immediate and responsive feedback that empowers the user and gives them confidence.

Take a look at Nick’s other work and make sure you clap back for all of the great articles he’s put into this original post. For a deeper dive you can also reference some of the tools and tutorials links as well.