Dear all,



Thank you for downloading CrazyTalk Animator 2 and providing us with your valuable feedback. You may notice some big differences between CTA 1 & 2, one of these being the Body Photo Fitting feature. In CTA 2, body photo fitting is no longer a suitable character production procedure for multi-dimensional characters, so we now fully depend on the character composer to assemble characters. However, in CTA 2, we also provide a new workflow for creating your own characters.



We have a collection of training resources available to help you with character creation. However, these training resources are not yet complete, and we’re attempting to speed up their production, particularly for the tutorials and help files.



Aside from that, we currently have the Character Pipeline Whitepaper available as a valuable character production tool for you. For those of you who would like to learn the details of the import process for characters designed in Flash, we encourage you to register any edition of CrazyTalk Animator 2 under your Reallusion member account in order to gain access to these valuable documents from your member page.



The following is our current schedule for production resources and training material for the character production pipeline:



1. Whitepaper (Released)
Register any edition of CrazyTalk Animator 2 under your Reallusion member account to gain access to this valuable document in your personal member page. How to Register Log in

2. Video Tutorial - Imaged-based Character Creation

3. Video Tutorial - Using our Flash Template for Multi-dimensional Character Creation

If you have any suggestion or feedback regarding the Whitepaper or any other learning topic regarding the character production pipeline, please leave your comments in this thread.


______________________________________

Bruce (RL)
Forum Moderator

Reallusion, Inc.
https://forum.reallusion.com

Nice Bruce! Thank you!


ALEMAR GAMES MARKETPLACE STORE

So the assumption is that anyone who wants to create a character will want to create a multi-dimensional character. That's too bad really, because I could care less for multidimensional characters, but I still want to create my own characters, and to do so, I must use the same old tired process that was already available in CTA1, sprite replacements, piece by piece. So all of those requests asking for better character creation fell on deaf ears.

Hi wizaerd,

It is very sad to see your all your negative comments about CTA2. It seems you have made your mind up to hate it already but I would urge you to spend a little time with the new features before giving up completely.

If your desire is to make G1 characters like those in CTA1, then I'm sure you will find the process in CTA2 much easier overall. CTA2 has added many new features to help with character creation such as the new and improved Sprite Editor, Runtime Composer and for Pipeline users the "Validate Multi-Angle Setup" feature. It may not look like it at first glance but once you get under the hood I think you will find there is much to like for character creators.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

I admit, I have been a bit negative about it, but only because this is not the CTA I was hoping for. So many of the features that people requested didn't make it in, and it really didn't make many things easier, it complicated them even more. Not to mention the removal of many features as well. I will stop being so vocal about it, and wait and see what happens.

Well
I never think this kind of program will be easy to work.
I work with 2D animations programs for years and prepare views to simulate 3D characters always was very time consume to work.
What RL did was to construct a nice pipeline for us to develop our own work.
In others programs is not so clear how to prepare multidimensional characters or simply they don't have this capacity.
And no one have a rway to import 3D motion capture files... This kind of feature put CTA2 between top 2D programs now!
I think RL did a great job and CTA2 will grow a lot and they will improve this workflow a lot.
I'm studing the pipeline and trying understand how to acelerate my work because this is very important for me now.


ALEMAR GAMES MARKETPLACE STORE

Hi there

Just trialling CTA2 - where is the Flash template to trial importing a multi-dimensional character?

Is this possible in the trial version?

Thanks



Thanks

Peter and Bruce,
Thanks for the information. I am excited to use CTA2.
I am wondering what the process is if I don't want to create a totally new character. In some cases, I only need to create certain assets, like different noses, hair, legs, torso, etc. that i can have to create more character options.
What is the process for that?

I am awaiting the training videos. The white paper is probably great for people with Flash experience, but there are a few gaps in it for Flash novices.

Since Serif Draw Plus was promoted with CTA1 as an ideal companion tool I was wondering if it was at all possible to use Serif Draw to create G2 Characters/character views?

My thoughts were that perhaps a Dummy template character file could be created for Serif Draws native file format with all the layers named correctly so that users could just redraw the various body parts on the corresponding layer for each view. Then the whole thing is exported out as a .swf file and imported into CTA2 as per the Flash to CTA2 work flow.

I'm certainly not a flash expert so I don't know if Serif's flash export structure even compares with native flash export but if there was some way to use Serif Draw to create G2 characters in this way then I'd be very happy indeed.

Part of the reason I went down the CTA1 rabbit hole is because I didn't need Adobe's Flash editor to create cartoon animation. I really don't want to buy Flash just for character creation in CTA2.



- TET
Animation and Video Life
The Lazy Animator - Tutorials for Cartoon Animator

Peter already stated draw plus support is expected in mid January

A different question is if X5 gonna be enough or will it require an upgrade to X6?

(A question still waiting for answer on a separate thread mind you...)