largento Posted June 21, 2015 Share Posted June 21, 2015 Well, Adobe released their Character Animator app this week. I've been playing with it some. On the plus side, it does an amazing job of tracking your face. At least the realtime display seems to be that way. Setting up a character is a little bit time consuming, but not majorly so. I had a character I'd built intending to animate in Flash, so I had lots of elements already built that could be used in the character (mouth shapes, etc.) For both Illustrator and Photoshop, the character is basically constructed by layer names. Where I ran into problems was that the actual recording of the tracking seems to be choppy. This may have to do with frame rate or the power of my Mac, but I haven't had great success with live acting/animating the character. AE allows you to use the face tracking with video and export those settings into Character Animator. That's probably the better way to do it. For vector art, you can add a wiggliness to the animation, which adds a certain style to it and keeps the animation alive when nothing's happening. The animation is then exported out as a sequence of PNG files (with alpha channels) and a wav file of the audio. Presumably, this could be brought into A:M and mapped onto the face of a character to get that decal eye and mouth animation look. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pixelplucker Posted June 21, 2015 Share Posted June 21, 2015 Have you looked at Anime Studio Pro (previously called Moho)? The more I use Adobe products the more distain I have for them and their horrid cloud sync that crashes my other programs. Illustrator CC 64 bit is only a 32 bit program that wastes valuable disk space in the programs x86 folder. What would be awesome is true vector rendering of 2d in AM. Maybe jus the ability to fill closed splines at render time. Add stroke weight to splines. And simply layer your shapes in z. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
largento Posted June 21, 2015 Author Share Posted June 21, 2015 Not really feeling a huge desire to do any 2D animation, but I confess I do like the look of having 2D cartoon eyes and mouths on 3D characters. In my thinking, it would be better just to have them controlled with pose sliders, but if you wanted to live perform your character, this might be an option. It's going to have to do better than what I'm getting, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pixelplucker Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 I do remember seeing an avatar animator that used real time on Steam but forget the name of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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