I'm coming back to CTA3 after a long hiatus and am trying figure some things out. G2 looks the choice for telling traditional cartoon stories involving multiple characters in a scene. Where some characters appear at 0 degrees and some at 90 degrees and some at 180 degrees. G3 looks like primarily for front facing characters providing a message directly to the camera/person viewing.  Most of what I want to accomplish seems to be more oriented to g2, but g2 looks to be a lot more work. G3 appears to more oriented to things like advertising. I'd like to get thoughts from people on this.

G3 character can be use in exactly the same way G1 characters were used. Basically anytime you a simple one angle character and don't mind either doing all the animation manually, or sticking to just prefab motions. For talking heads style animations and general presentation type stuff where the characters are speaking to the audience members, G3 will work best. And if your stories are told in the style of characters on a stage always facing the 4th wall then that should work out perfectly fine as well.



In general if your doing a story where the character should interact more with themselves and objects you will get a better performance out of the G2 characters because of their ability to actually more in 3d space. they can look at each other, walk towards or away stuff, move within 3D space from one pose to the next or even have multiple body parts across multiple 3d planes at the same time... you can have the head look 90 degrees to the left while the torso runs 180 degrees to the other way.  Stuff like that, also if you are able to work with mocap data you can make use of it to increase the animation speed by incorporating 3d mocap data, helps to speed things up by like 90% at least.

My personal recommendation if if you are using it for filmmaking or more conventional style type of animation like short films, commercials, etc that require more than just standing and facing the camera, then use a combination of both. Use G2 for the majority of the work, get all your angles in and motions etc done relatively quickly, and use g3 as a suplement for angles that G2 character are not able to achieve. For example there are 8 horizontal  angles achievable in regular g2. But lets say you need something other than a 0, 90, 180 degree etc... what if in order to successfully pull of a scene you need your character to be filmed from sort of a 110 degree angle horizontal and with the camera tilting downwards/upwards from another 45 degree vertical... this is impossible with a g2 character, but you can easily achieve the desired shot using a single angle g3 character...





Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
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Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Hi,
is there an easy was to convert a character from g2 to g3?
Johannes

Unfortunately not.

G2 characters are multi angle characters which can be viewed from 10 angles. G3 characters only have front and side facing views. So to make a G3 character into a G2 character would mean drawing or sourcing images for all the other missing angles which is obviously quite a time consuming process.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

This is the sort of stuff that really confuses me.
One might naively assume G3 is "new and better" and capable of doing everything the older G2 can do, plus more.
It seems so strange that G3 is more limited than G2 (front/side views versus 10 angles).
That sounds so backwards to me.

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I have to agree. Personally, from a tech standpoint, G3 characters are really just a more advanced or convenient way of making "advanced props". Technically you can make the equivalent of G3 characters in CTA1 and CTA2 using linked items in the prop composer. And as long as you maintain the linkage you can make reusable motions for your "props". Really the naming is where RL kinda failed. G2 are definitely the more advanced of the two, but the naming is misleading. They could have named them something more appropriate like "character rigs" or even kept it stylized like "Gx" or something funky like that which would have implied an alternative format rather than an evolution, which is not.  

I do like the stretchy stuff though. that's a big bonus. But I like the vector format more than the stretchy stuff, so usually when i need the equivalent of a G3 character I just build it in the prop composer which allows me to make those type of characters using vector.


Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Can you do a Tut on this process?

Can you do a Tut on this process?