Hi, Cartoon Animators

Cartoon Animator (CTA) is all about providing an easy and creative solution that empowers
all skill level users to animate. Reallusion is grateful and proud that CTA has positioned itself
among leading animation tools. Let’s take a brief look back at 2019 to see the milestones you
had joined CTA with.



2019 Recap

• April of 2019, CTA 4 launched and change the name from CrazyTalk Animator to Cartoon Animator.
• CTA 4 debuted 2D webcam facial mocap, simplifying the most difficult part of character animation by projecting your facial expressions onto your virtual characters.
• July, CTA annual contest "Animation At Work". 
• Joined by over 170 users with 270 submitted videos. We had more creativity and skill in a single contest, than ever before.
• September, the draw to animate pipeline.
• While the contest was still running, we launched PSD Roundtrip Editing giving everyone with the ability to draw, to now animate. At the same time, Reallusion partnered with Photopea to provide a free image editor for all users.

Non of these would happen without your support for CTA!

Before all the new features, Reallusion would like to make an official statement on the
recent posts on the "Cartoon Animator Users FB group" regarding CTA's performance.
We are looking into it right now.



What's new in 2020?

• Hand and Body Mocap
• The Motion LIVE 2D plugin will make CTA the only 2D animation software that can capture the motions of your fingers, hands and body. Additionally, all mocap results can be easily edited. This will save humongous production time. With the existing facial mocap, a performer can animate an entire character including face, fingers, limbs and body which is perfect for quick production, interactive show and live performance.  

• After Effects Plugin
• Since the most animators choose Adobe After Effects for post production. Reallusion decided to combine CTA's speedy character animating system with AE's vast library of special effects to simplify the animation process. By bringing layers of sprite from CTA to AE, users can perfect every element in post production while preserving all animation keys. For users without AE, they can select and group animation assets and export as sequence images then edit in other video production software.

• 3D Motion Plugin
• Reallusion will break the boundary between 3D and 2D by making the world of 3D motions for CTA to use. With this plugin, any 3D human motions can be easily converted and applied on CTA characters. Besides double the value of the 3D motions you already have, this also enriches your CTA motion library with unlimited possibility.

• Smart Gallery, an intelligent way to manage your assets. Know More about Smart Gallery

This is all exciting stuff - looking forward to it.

One piece of feedback I would give is that my choice of CTA is specifically because it's not Adobe. Based on forum posts here I don't think I'm the only one. We are currently transitioning away from Adobe and we have decided that we will not be renewing our CC licences in 2020. For me, what would be more interesting than the AE plugin would be integrations with Resolve/Fusion and the upcoming Cavalry.   

Looks like a great year coming up for CTA4! The ability to use 3D motion, extended mocap and to export image sequences for external editing (I, too, do not use Adobe products, but will now be able to do this in the video editor I use) are all welcome additions...oh, yeah, and being able to organise assets. In other words, everything sounds great!
Thanks for all of your hard work in developing these new features.

Great to all!
....but 3D Motion Plugin is my favorite 

The genius of the Reallusion team!
Great work.
I too am not an Adobe fan but good there will be other options.
Finally get to use my Leap Motion for caricature drawings.

| Windows 11 64bit / iClone7 Pro / Headshot Plug-in / Character Creator v4 / Perception Neuron Profile for Motion LIVE 2D Plug-in/ CrazyTalk 8 Pipline / FaceFilter v3 PRO / Cartoon Animator 5 Pipeline/Serif DrawPlus X8 / 3DXchange 6 Pro / WidgetCast PRO / DP Animation Maker / PopVideo 3

Looking great and an exciting year for CTA.  Looking at all the leap motion work I do hope that these features will be mac compatible as well as PC and the hand motions and body tracking will be included with the current purchased plugins.  I'm guessing the 3D motion will be an additional plugin that'll need to be purchased on top of the current available plugins? 

I too don't use or want to use Adobe products so for me personally this feature doesn't interest me too much personally but hope it leads the way for other integrations such as Hit Film, Premiere and Final cut pro.  Would love to see Reallusion work with normal mapping to add light sources to 2D animations as I think that could look amazing (maybe in 2021).  This would give even greater depth to animations without too much work.  I think CTA mixing with the 3D world is a great thing and from what I've experimented with you can do some pretty cool things. 

Hope we get all these new toys in our hands soon and for me it's finally feeling like a true CTA4 at last   Oh and if you'd like a mac tester who owns an original leap motion just shout. 

I wouldn't want RL to spend time on that. We have other, more pressing needs.

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Oh this 3D Motion Plugin looking good 

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Looks like some interesting additions indeed. I have After Effects CS6. I gave up on the Adobe Cloud a few years ago. I mainly use Davinci Resolve and Blackmagic Fusion, which are much more powerful. I’ll have to see what animation tools are available in the plugin. If it’s layers, lighting and the built-in plugins in AE like motion blur, like the video shows, It would be easy to do all that in Resolve, A mention to the Reallusion programmers, Blackmagic has a new API that looks really great. Resolve is used in the industry on many film studios such as Marvel Studios. Resolve’s free version is very powerful and would open your products to many more users.Nice work Reallusion!

https://digitalvectorstudios.com/