Thanks for passing along the feedback.  

I also find Adobe to be an absolute money pit as a hobbyist. I instead invested in Affinity Designer (great vector program) and also Clip Studio Paint. Clip Studio Paint is my favourite, but I usually use Affinity Designer as the plugged in editor with Cartoon Animator. However, if creating backgrounds or character sketches I always start off in Clip Studio Paint.

Today I worked out even Adobe Animate>Adobe Illustrator> CTA5 svg import.  Now I can create vector images in adobe animate and bring them into CTA5.
Agreed Adobe is a money pit but it integrates flawlessly.




CTA5, Iclone 7, 3D Exchange Pro, Character Creator 3, Popcornfx plugin, Zbrush, Blender, Vue 2014, Adobe cc suite, Spriter
Homebuild Workstation (Pretty old now but still working great) Win 10, Intel i7 950, 24 GB RAM DDR3, Gigabyte x58a-ud7 motherboard, AMD R9 390 sapphire 8GB VRAM.
Official Website  Reallusion Store  

Hi my friends.
Cartoon Animator is dependent on third party software and resources. You can't create entertaining video clips without extra resources.  Does any find the price of the software expensive if you include all the additional third party software and other resources.  

Thanks for commenting on the topic. 
Have a Happy New Year. 

It is expensive if you use Adobe products alongside Cartoon Animator, and it is strange that Adobe is concentrated on and promoted so much when Adobe has its own animation programmes. However, you don't have to use any other programmes alongside Cartoon Animator, and if you do, you can find free versions of similar software which fits the bill. Examples include; Photopea, and Krita being the main free software I can think of. The main problem with free software is getting it to integrate with Cartoon Animator. Whilst I personally use Affinity Designer and Clip Studio Paint, both reasonably priced graphics editors, Krita is also a capable graphics editor and is totally FREE.

Man if you are a designer, you must be using Adobe Suite.
For example, for vector images I rely on Adobe Animate. I have been doing it for years. Now I do all the game animations in animate or I use spriter to create the animations which can be imported directly into game engines.

It is not that Reallusion wants you to use Adobe Products.

It is that designers should know all the Adobe products by the back of their hands, especially if they are working in some animation, design studio. or a game studio. If you post a job resume to these studios, they will ask first whether you know Adobe suite or not.
Adobe suite is required by default for any design studio.

The problem comes when hobby users just want to start with CTA5, and they are stuck because they have never used Adobe products before.
Many others after the online subscriptions came out, have dropped Adobe suite for money reasons. It is damn expensive.

So either you get Adobe products or you get the other ones mentioned above.

But if you are a student or just starting to design - this is how you should learn designing software -

1)Illustrator
2)Photoshop
3) Animate
4) Premiere
5) After Effects
other Adobe products if you wish to.
then move to CTA5

Then to 3D software... Blender, iclone, cc, unreal engine, and so on.
Many have just started using software like CTA online which is getting famous, so many try to skip the default learning series of design software before they can actually start dabbling with CTA5.

You can never make good animation without using the default designing software like Adobe suite or others mentioned above.

So learn those first.

Now integrating the other software is not easy with CTA5. Hopefully, someone will put up some tutorials.

Been using Adobe suite for 20 years now, and I am definitely never going to downgrade my skill set and go to other software.



CTA5, Iclone 7, 3D Exchange Pro, Character Creator 3, Popcornfx plugin, Zbrush, Blender, Vue 2014, Adobe cc suite, Spriter
Homebuild Workstation (Pretty old now but still working great) Win 10, Intel i7 950, 24 GB RAM DDR3, Gigabyte x58a-ud7 motherboard, AMD R9 390 sapphire 8GB VRAM.
Official Website  Reallusion Store  

Hi Everyone, 
Tutorials have always been a problem because of the assumption that customers already have previous knowledge of Adobe products. Adobe is industry standard for graphic design working online. I have purchased Cartoon Animator 5 but I haven't had a lot of time to work with it.  I guess I will have to give my evaluation of it soon.  

Thanks for commenting everyone. 

That's not true at all. Third party software can help speedup production but is not a requirement. You can certainly make entertaining video clips and movies with just Cartoon Animator itself.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Hi Peter,   You must have third party software to create props, characters and scenes.  Customers would have limited options without third party software. This is reality of Cartoon Animator. 

It would certainly be useful to have some form of inbuilt image editor in Cartoon Animator, even a very basic one.