First the likes... First is the ease of animation, specifially using fully rigged characters and the library of actions/performances.  While surely not an extensive list of actions and performances, the included walk cycles are a real boon.  Using the 2 other 2D animation packages (ASP (Anime Studio Pro) and TBS (ToonBoom Studio)), one of the hardest aspects of those applications is in setting up the character and creating walk cycles.  So that inclusion in CTA makes animating much easier.  And being able to link and unlink props is also something that is a great advantage, for picking up items, carrying them, throwing them, handing them to another character.  Extremely useful.

The full body photo fitting is a neat feature, but it's not nearly as versatile as using the sprite based characters.  Certainly you can take an image and create a fully animatible character with little bit of effort, but unless you're using high quality images you're taking yourself (so the positioning is correct), it's difficult to get a really good looking character.  Most of them will be frontal views, and quite frankly a frontal view character isn't nearly as intereting or as animatible as a side view character. For a JibJab style of animation, it's adequate.

The facial fitting features for photographs, specifically for creating animatible faces and heads, is top notch.  But seeing as that's based on CrazyTalk itself, I have no qualms with it, as I've always been a big fan of CrazyTalk.

The interface itself is fairly clean, and user friendly with few exceptions.  Those exception would be the image centric dialog boxes, for masking, photo fitting, facial fitting etc... They're just too small.  If they were sizable or bigger, to give me more image viewing realestate, I'd be much happier...

But there are two glaring omissions I feel are necessary to be a bit more competitive with the other two applications.  And no, they don't include drawing features.  I already have a slew of drawing programs for both vectors and bitmaps, so the lack of drawing tools inside of CTA doesn't bother me in the least. No the first glaring omission is the ability to custom create a sprite based character.  I know of many people who like to draw their characters in pieces, and not having the ability to import these individual pieces and assemble them into a working character is a fairly large missing feature.  I suppose many people will have to assemble their characters, export out as an image and then go through the full body photo fitting process, but to many, that may seem like an additional unwarranted step. 

The other glaring omission, based on the first one, is the lack of different body styles for sprite based characters.  Again, since I cannot import nor create my own sprite based characters, I'm left with what comes with CTA, and I'm not overly impressed.  All the sprite characters and body styles are thin, very skinny.  I cannot use those same body parts to create a heaveset trucker, a Santa Claus, an office worker, a waitress, etc...  Using photo fitting, I could find image likes that and try to use them, then mix them up with the sprite characters, but they just look wrong.

While it is possible to edit individual pieces of a photo fitted body in an image editor, there is no such utility for the vector based sprite characters. Regardless of how many facial combinations you can create with the hair, eyes, ears, nose, and mouths all the sprite based characters will be very similiar in build and stature.

One of my biggest concerns for this product though is that RL will also recognize the limited body styles and shapes, and will release content packs that, like the iClone content packs, will be more expensive than they should be.  Of course, with iClone, the possibility for users to create their own characters and share them will be much more limited in CTA, since again, we cannot import nor create our own sprite based characters.

For an animation application, I like it.  For a character creation system, I'm not particularly happy with the offereings.  I hope that eventually RL will give us the ability to create, from scratch, full vector sprite based characters.

Just my $0.02...

So in theory, if you wanted to go through the steps, you could take a premade sprite based character, and replace every piece of it.  Of course unless your pieces are assembled and sized to match the premade character, it's going to be a long process.

It's something I've been messing around with, to find the most efficient workflow for it, and as of yet, all my results haven't been show worthy yet.  And I have limited time for experimentation, basically Saturday only, so it may take me a while to get back to it.

You'll notice that I had since added an additional comment stating the same basic thing.  It is still true you cannot import a complete character in pieces, and assemble it in CTA.  You can however go through and modify each and every part of a pre-made character (the "black dummy" is a pre-made character) that you have to go through and modify each and every limb, importing your exported pieces one by one, tediously I might add.  In the Sprite editor, click the limb, import the piece, size, rortate, and position as appropriate, close the sprite editor box, go the next limb.  As I have stated it is a very tedious process.  Even exporting the pieces out one by one can be tedious.

A better approprach would be to let users draw and/or create their characters and export as a whole (swf would be the best routine since they'd remain vectors as opposed to rasterized images, but suppose it can take PSD (photo shop files) too).  Put each piece on a pre-named layer (r_hand, r_forearm, r_bicep, etc...  using whatever RL names their default layers for their characters)  Then save/export that character as a whole, import as a whole, modify the pivot points for proper joint alignment, and boom done.

• Loaded up the flash file, created a new scene, and used one of the pre-posed characters from the symbol library.  I tried sizing the Flash document to be the minimum required to see the whole character.
• The pre-posed character was grouped together as a symbol, so I ungrouped it, giving me individual pieces for the upper arms, lower arms, hands, upper legs, etc...  I did not further ungroup the head, I left it as a single piece, although if you wanted to allow for additional eye blinks and lip synching, you'd probably want to ungroup the head too.
• I selected everything on the screen, went to Modify->Timeline->Distribute to layers.  This takes every selected item and moves it to its own layer, with a keyframe for each piece at frame zero on every layer.
• I then moved the keyframes so that only 1 single piece was visible on the screen at a time.  For 16 pieces, there are 16 frames 1 piece visible each frame.
• I exported the movie as a sequence of PNG images.  I had hoped I could export it out as a sequence of SWFs so that when I imported it into CTA, it's retain it's vector shape, but alas Flash doesn't allow for this (at least version CS4)
• Now each image exports out at the size of the Flash document, so the small pieces had a whole lot of space around it.  I figured this might be overkill,or bog the system down, so I first loaded each PNG into Fireworks, and trimmed the canvas so it was only as big as the piece. (I may attempt this later without doing this step... I'll explain at the end of this message)
• I then loaded up CTA, and put onto the stage the black dummy.
• I went into character composer,and selected each item of the black dummy, opening the sprite editor.  I hit the replace button, and loaded the appropriate PNG for that piece.  As I imported each piece I had to resize, reposition, and rotate many of them to get them aligned.  Unfortunately I was unable to make it look exactly as the prebuilt character in the original Flash file. Of course by this time I had thus spent close to 5 hours doing this, and was getting worn out.  It should go faster next time since I was also experimenting as I went a long.
• I also had to repositin the pivot point on each item s well

Eventually I had a character assembled.  I had to go through calibration several times (more than several actually) and I still didn;t really get the pivots or the positioning quite right.  Here is the result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphNc1jSzbs

As you'll notice lots of the layering of elements is off as well...

Next time, I'm thinking of not pulling the images into Fireworks for trimming the canvas.  I'm thinking that perhaps if I leave them at their original size, they'll be far easier to place and position and shouldn't need re-scaling.  Of course, this will require more computer resources when I use that character, but perhaps it won't be so bad (although I'm not holding my breath)...

I had made this suggestion yesterday, and now after spending an evening to do this, I wish even more fervently for a better streamlined process.

[EDIT]

I tried not trimming them in Fireworks, and they still require to be repositioned and rotated, it's still messy...

• The initial character in Flash - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_1.png
• After he's been broken up and distributed to layers - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_2.png
• the timeline showing the positioning how I set the frames for 1 piece per frame - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_3.png
• After export, and trimming here are the pieces - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Pieces.png
• Load up the black dummy and get ready to start replacing pieces - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_4.png
• Replaced the head - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_5.png
• All pieces replaced, with no repositioning.  You'll notice the position is waaaay off, as well as the rotation - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_6.png
• After the character has been re-assembled as the original - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_7.png
• How the character looks after adding it to the stage.  Notice that the character name has been changed, and yet in the scene manager it still shows "black dummy" - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_8.png

However, as seen in this video things still go wonky when animating it - (youtube's acting wonky this morning, it wont play the animation so I uploaded the vids to my own site) http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/EdgarElf.mp4

• So I did some repositioning of the limbs to try and get it to be more like the defailt pose the black dummy is actually in - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/Screen_9.png

I tried re-exporting, and some of it is better, however that left foot just goes all crazy regardless of what I do - http://www.wizaerd.com/hold/CTA/EdgarElf_2.mp4

It's difficult to tell if this should be a side character or a front character.  The upper body seems to be a side view whereas the bottom half should be a frontal view, so it's doubtful any of the pre-canned animations would lookright.

So what I have learned from this? 

• The initial pose of your character is of extreme importance, it's better to get their initial or default pose as close to the default pose of the character you're going to modify
• Importing custom character sux
• This character is not a sprite based character after all, but is still a bitmap cutout character, this is determined because while in the Sprite Editor you can open each individual piece in an image edirot thru CTA, whereas with a true sprite character, the image editor is disabled
• Meticulous positioning and placement of pivots is required
• There still needs to be a streamlined process for this, and there has to be a way to keep characters as sprites as opposed to cutouts.  The only difference between this character and a character created in the full body photo fitting is CTA does all the cutout and pivot placement, all I did was manually accomplish the same thing.  Again, it's not a sprite character.  I might have been better off going thru the full body photo fitting, but it's not what I wanted.  I wanted a vector based sprite character

So that's it for now.  I'll keep trying, but honestly I'm finding it not really worth the effort, but that's just my opinion.  If it were streamlined, allowing me to import a character as a whole but maintain it as a vector thus sprite based character, it'd be better off, again only my opinion.

[quote]

Here is what I mean with cut and prepare .It is quick and dirty not nice , but show the basic know .
http://www.mjmedia.de/cutout/cutout.html

[/quote]

I'm curious, how would you proceed if you wanted an outline on your character?

It is certainly possible to build a sprite based character in CTA but sadly this involves more work that just using photo mode. The two methods are there, photo mode for those who want to quickly create a character and sprite mode for more advanced character creation, but obviously this is more time consuming.

I think CTA users will quickly find that sprite characters can indeed be created in CTA and the time it takes to build your character will get quicker and quicker the more practice you get.

vidi (12/4/2010)

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I'm curious, how would you proceed if you wanted an outline on your character?

with and without lines setting at the joins

How did you get the stroke to be removed on that postion?  I dont know of many programs that'll allow you to have a filled object with a broken outline (stroke).  Is that a speacial feature of Xara, which you said you use, or is the outline and the underlying fill itself two seperate items/objects?

Thats a little bit of a disappointing answer.  I was hoping for a pledge of  a help file to  show best practices in creating Characters for the software and a  revelation of future plans to add better workflows.  I am struggling to  figure out whether  RL wants this to be a tool to be ultimately used for professional use or just the hobbyist (or even novelty) market.  it has some great features that could speed workflow  for quick projects but on the other  hand as I noted in another  post awhile ago content import (particularly in regard to character creation) seems to be a step child  both in the software and in the documntation. Its even possible that its in therebut the documentation doesn't seem to geared toward it if it is. 

Number one for  your next  video tutorial should be how to actually best accomplish bringing in a custom sprite character and having it work as flawlessly as the included content.  Merely creating character packs for sale suggests that  you really are not aiming ultimately at a  real 2d animation solution.  Animators of all kinds including half serious hobbyists need to work with thei own licensable characters.