Dec 7, 2018 - Reallusion announces its 2D animation software CrazyTalk. Real Time Animation- Review of Reallusion's iClone 7 February 18, 2019. CrazyTalk Animator is a fully-featured animation tool designed for users to create professional marketing videos, animated avatars and comic effects for PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Doc and other presentation software.
Posted by on May 31, 2017 Publisher: Reallusion Website: Platform: PC, Mac x32/x64: x32/x64 Description: 2D animation Purchase/Rent: Purchase Pricing: Pipeline Edition: $299, Pro Edition: $179, Standard Edition: $69 Download Demo: Expected Release: Available Now Review Issue: #135 (05/17) Reviewed By: Final Score: 7.0 (out of 10) Microfilmmakers come in all flavors and interests. Animation is something that isn’t ‘pure’ videography, but story telling doesn’t really care. Like we add special effects in post production, we can also add animation.
It really depends on what the story requires. CrazyTalk Animator3 is a 2D animation package from the very capable company, Reallusion. Known for their outstanding iClone and Character Creator software for the 3D environs, (also useful for 3D storyboarding or outright rendering to video), Reallusion has upgraded their 2D animation offering with Animator3. As I get started, there are a couple things to note. First, Reallusion totally embraces the KISS philosophy of Keep It Simple Stupid. That means their software comes loaded with presets and has significant ready-to-use content already available for it. Secondly, I’m looking at this software from a full production pipeline view (as we’re reviewing the Pipeline version of this software).
The reason I bring that up is because while CrazyTalk Animator3 is a very solid 2D animation offering, it may not be right for your work flow for your story telling needs. Lastly, a very important awareness is that CrazyTalk Animator3 (CTA3) is a content manipulation program, rather than a content creation program. Unlike some competing 2D packages, you can’t actually make content to animate in CTA3, such as characters or objects.
If you’re not animating pre-made content, you’ll need to make new content in a third party program such as Illustrator or Photoshop and then be imported. (In this regard, it’s quite similar to their Crazy Talk software, which is for creating animated photos and talking head pieces.). Prebuilt Characters: CrazyTalk Animator 3 has a range of pre-existing characters that may suit your needs, right out of the box. What makes these characters easy to work with is the fact that the hard work has been done and users can adjust the animation with simple tools. Ease of Use Like everything I’ve experienced from Reallusion, CrazyTalk Animator3 is super easy to use.
Double-clicking inserts items and simple drag/drop motions let users bring content in from the computer desktop or file browsers. It’s almost like the development team asked themselves, “what are the most common things a new animator would want to do quickly?”, and then built CTA3 around it. As I mentioned before, the version I am using for the review is the full Pipeline version which has all the bells, whistles and basic extra content they offer.
(I say “basic”, because they are always expanding the add-on packages, which of course wouldn’t be included.) Full backgrounds, multiple stock characters, object and character motions have been included. If you are satisfied (or able) to work with preexisting stock content, there is plenty to choose from.
For users wanting to explore doing some custom character work, getting the full Pipeline edition is required. The pipeline edition enables creation of non-stock characters and other little animation customization and import. In many production ways, 2D animation can be more complex than even 3D work, because 2D doesn’t behave like the physics of the real world.
Reallusion has done a very good job of hiding that complexity by providing point and click modifiers for motion and animation. Want to have a stock character look left and turn their head a little? Just use the face puppet and animate that.
(Remember when Adobe rolled out the puppet tool for After Effects around CS2 or CS3 where you could put pins for joints and then distort the rest of the image? Similar idea.) Want a falling object to bounce a little when it hits the floor? Just select the motion tweener that looks the best. No additional tweaking required. Simply drag and drop the preset onto the object or double-click it.
Depth of Options There are plenty of preprogrammed options designed to work with the stock content. In that sense there are plenty of options. It is easy to quickly begin doing some complex animation with stock content, using simple widgets and drag-and-drop authoring. But, that is where we begin hitting the limits of what the program will do for you if you are planning to work with original content. To be clear, I understand that CTA3 is designed for 2D animation novices. Consequently, the following isn’t an indictment of the program, merely an observation.
If you are wanting to work with a character or elements you create yourself, limitations to efficiently animating become apparent rather quickly. For example, you cannot directly edit vector content or pixel based content. If a user wants to animate a face to include multiple, morphing expressions without having to use something called switching, (where static shapes are rapidly switched to create the illusion of motion such as talking) then, you are out of luck. (This lack is especially interesting because morphing is the way the animation in their initial Crazy Talk line is created. It’s odd that they wouldn’t give you the option to use the more true 2D style found in CTA3 or the morphing option found in CrazyTalk 8.) Furthermore, everything needing a change requires round-tripping to the art program, exporting the change and re-importing to CTA3. Likewise, integrating with live footage is problematic also.
While users can drop video footage into the background and animate on top of it, there is no ability to motion-track footage, making matching animated movement to video movement next to impossible. Static shots would be ok, though, but tools for creating some 2D shadows that would visually integrate animation better are also missing.
Finally, while users can export sequenced.png files with a transparent background, the silhouetting doesn’t have an option for premultiplied alpha channels, meaning objects can have a bit of pixelated edge. The best workaround is to select a color that is common in the footage and have CTA3 anti-alias to that color, but it still creates a subtle halo effect. For example, if you have footage from a car garage, the walls and ceiling area would be fairly dark, but the concrete floor would be light. If your character was aliased to a darker color but crossed into the concrete area, you would see a slightly pixelated edge, Likewise if the character was aliased to a light color, but crossed into a dark region. (Still, this is an improvement over what our editor found when he reviewed Crazy Talk 7 or 8, which has no option to export transparent background images.).
Bone Rigging: If your Photoshop skills are reasonably good, CTA3 makes it very easy to take still images, like this classic painting by Millet, and animate the scene. For Microfilmmakers, this can be a good way to rapidly create animatics. Performance Once you understand your limitations in regards to what you can create, CTA3 is a breeze to work with.
It’s smooth and fast, both when interactively working and when rendering. All popular pixel imagery formats and video types of AVI, WMV, RM, RMVB, MPEG, MPG, MPE, MP4, ASF, ASX, WM, FLV, MOV and popVideo formats can be imported. (Unfortunately, vector artwork can only be imported via the now antiquated.swf format.) Exporting has a wizard that lets you pick from standard presets for both image sequence and movie formats and adjusted if needed. The video renderer is reasonably fast and audio can be exported as an individual track, if needed. Really important is documentation.
Reallusion excels at this. The help documents/manual are all online, so an active web connection is a must (especially since all activation options for the software are online exclusive).
The manual is indexed, searchable and comprehensive, plus they’ve included a lot of video tutorials. Combining Characters: Photographic images can also be combined with stock 2D characters. In this example, a CTA3 Morph Head (A photo that has been projected onto 3D geometry) can be posed and animated with very simply click-and-move tools. Value What CTA3 does, it does very well. For folks creating corporate animation or exploring the basics of animation for self-study/YouTube experiments or for creating mockups for kickstarters, this is a very handy tool. However, my experience with the Microfilmmaker market is that we like to tell a wide variety of stories that are usually fairly sophisticated.
Because of that, I’m not sure that CTA3 is a good fit for most of us, unless you’re willing to put a huge amount of time creating all the pieces for custom models with illustrator and photoshop or unless you’ve got a lot of extra cash to pay someone else to put in the work for custom models through the Reallusion Marketplace. If you’ve ever used PowerPoint, I would liken CTA3 to that paradigm.
It’s very good for a narrow range of 2D animation, driven by presets. In fact, CTA3 includes ‘emphasis’ animation presets that a PowerPoint user would recognize instantly. While it may not be the best for creating original content, if you need a ‘Clippy’ style animation, you know, the paperclip Windows used to use, for a project, want to create a work safety video, or a Wayne Knight-style “chastising” animation (as in the Jurassic Park computer screen lockout), this is the software to use. Final Comments My scoring is less about the quality of the software than whether its a good fit for a production environment.
CTA3 is a solid product that lives up to its promises. But since it is targeted to animation beginners who aren’t needing to create original character models, the range of utility is very limited for Indie filmmakers. For Microfilmmakers needing a more production grade solution, something like Smith Micro’s MOHO is better suited and more versatile. Note From Editor: After this review was finished, Reallusion did release some additional import options for integrating things with Photoshop which were not able to be covered in this review. While the author didn’t feel that this altered things enough with CTA’s complexities in creating new 2D model content, it’s definitely.
If you’re uncertain whether this is a good fit for what you need to do, you’re highly encouraged to try.
Product Review: CrazyTalk Animator PRO 'CrazyTalk Animator is the next major leap after CrazyTalk6. Before, the CrazyTalk product line was initially focused on talking head animation. In this new generation of CrazyTalk, you can not only animate a character's face, but also do full-body animation with enhanced bone-based fitting technology in the unique puppeteering engine.
CrazyTalk Animator is a revolutionary animation suite with 3D layering mechanics and drag-n-drop multi-media compatibility that allows you to import your characters and props directly from photo ' -Reallusion.com Major advances in computer graphics over the last decade have given the animator tools to create remarkable 2D and 3D films, commercials and motion graphics. It's also narrowed the gap between the amateur and professional user. All kinds of people want to create quality animation, but don't have the time (or the money) to invest in high-end 2D/3D packages that cost thousands of dollars.
Dozens of companies have sprung up over the last few years with software that attempts to satisfy this growing amateur/pro market. But not all of them have been able to deliver on their marketing promises. One company that has consistently delivered programs that are not only easy to use, but have pro-level features, is Reallusion. Their recent December, 2010 release of (an update from CrazyTalk 6) is a great example of a full-featured program at a great price. I've used Reallusion's original CrazyTalk program for several years now and have always felt it was one of the best photo/image morphing applications around. Initially, it was a a program that allowed you to animate heads and faces using a mesh-based approach to animation, along with very good lipsync capabilities.
After 6 versions of that program, which focused on refining the facial animation process, including adding 'real time' puppeteering, Reallusion has completely re-worked CrazyTalk into a full-scale animation program rivaling applications like Toon Boom and Anime Studio Pro. Their release of CrazyTalk Animator is a milestone in the development of an already excellent program. It's a whole new ballgame, which is probably why the 'Animator' has now been added to the original CrazyTalk name. Let's take a look at how Reallusion has re-imagined CrazyTalk, and then consider how the new version of the program makes it easy to create a variety of high-quality animation styles.
Note that CrazyTalk Animator comes in two flavors: the Standard and PRO versions. I'll be reviewing the PRO version here. The of the program is primarily designed for the beginner and casual user. The PRO version is for more serious animators who need more features. GUI of CrazyTalk Animator Pro New in CrazyTalk Animator PRO.
The major change is that now you can animate full body characters, in addition to facial animation and lip sync. Moreover, with the 'super media' approach, CrazyTalk Animator allows you to drag-n-drop just about any media, including images, videos, flash and sprite videos right on to the animation stage. The user now has a complete animation editing environment for actor, scene, animation and sfx, along with a special library for each element. Essentially, the program is a complete animation editing environment for 2D animation. – There's a Composer Mode for your character and prop set ups and you have the Stage Mode for animation editing. You also have an in-screen Object Editing Gizmo and Navigation toolsets all laid out simply and intuitively.
All scene elements can be arranged on a Z-depth layer inside of the preview window. CTA allows you to switch between perspective and orthographic views, and there is a full scene manager that lets you track and control every element of your scene. (PRO Version Only) – One of the most impressive improvements in CrazyTalk Animator is in the new Timeline. Motion layering, 16 tracks of body part animation control, extend/loop/group clips together using copy/paste/move keys, separate facial motion tracks, and dockable timeline placement are only a few of the excellent new additions to the timeline which will make using the program even easier. – The real-time feature has expanded from facial animation to the entire body in CrazyTalk Animator.
![Animator Animator](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125488439/529864217.png)
You can also control the speed and exaggeration of the motions and save just about any combination you create. – Sprites, which are graphic objects that can move independently of the background/other objects, allow the user to animation different faces or body parts either in real-time or using keys. The full list of 'what's new' in CrazyTalk Animator PRO is too large for this review, so I've only covered the highlights here. For a full list of new features, see. Facial puppeteering in CTA Pro Performance Working with CrazyTalk Animator is really a lot of fun.
Although the interface has changed quite a bit to allow for the new animation system, anyone who has used an earlier version of CrazyTalk will feel right at home, and beginners will be creating animation in minutes - it's that simple. Basically, the user can choose to create two types of animation: morph-based and sprite-based. The morph-based animation consists of photos, scanned images (you can easily take a photo of yourself and bring it into the program as a character) or raster images. You then take the photo, or drawing, and through a helpful wizard create bones for the character, which you then shape and distort to create motion and expressions. Head and facial morphing is a bit more complex for beginners, but the range of tools you have to create unique faces and features is really neat. Sprite-based animation is different (similar to flash animation) in that you use raster images and replacement animation to create movement and lip-sync. The addition of the z-buffer and 3D viewer makes setting up this kind of animation easy.
Plus, the 3D camera can create some amazing imagery/animation with all kinds of depth to them. Both types of animation can be either key-framed or real-time, too. There is a large content library that lets you get started quickly.
And Reallusion has extra content packs that can be purchased separately, including props, backgrounds, facial features, etc. In my experience, their content packs are always well done and relatively inexpensive.
Full-body bone rigging with CTA Pro Animating with CrazyTalk Animator PRO 1.1 is an enjoyable and creative experience. I found that once I got the hang of how workflow is handled, I was importing images and animating very quickly and the time just flew. I enjoyed the original CrazyTalk very much, but this is an entirely new program, one that is far more powerful and allows for much more creative expression by the user (either pro or hobbyist). And what's particularly impressive, is that Reallusion really hasn't made this powerful 2D animation program any more difficult to use or understand.
Considering the massive amount of coding involved in this new version, that's no easy task. The documentation for CrazyTalk Animator PRO (and the Standard version) is excellent, with a full manual and lots of at the Reallusion.com site.
The there are also well managed and attention is paid to advanced, as well as new users. After having fun all week with this very cool program, I think that Reallusion has hit a home run with.
I don't know of any other program in it's price range that has as many features and is as easy to use. I mean, you can even export your work in 3D!
As part of it's, Reallusion has the Standard version on sale for $37.46 (USD); the PRO version is also on sale at $134.96 (USD), and upgrades are reasonably priced (there's an education version available, too). Advanced timeline in CTA Pro CrazyTalk Animator Standard is a perfect entry program for those who want to start learning animation, and the PRO version is very well suited to more advanced users who want to benefit from the great price and range of features.
Download the and see what's so cool about this program. You won't regret it.
Notes Full system requirements are. Unfortunately, there is no Mac or Linux version of the program at present.
Something I hope Reallusion will consider for future versions of the program. I use a mid-range quad-core PC running Windows 7 and the program smokes, so most users should be fine. I'd like to thank Reallusion, and in particular, (personne adroit), for providing CrazyTalk Animator PRO for review. ERROR: videopro element file 'videoproplayer' doesn't exist.
CrazyTalk Animator Pro: New Features For more information, please visit:. Staff Columnist with the Renderosity Front Page News. Ricky Grove is a bookstore clerk at the best bookstore in Los Angeles, the Iliad Bookshop.
He's also an actor and machinima filmmaker. He lives with author, Lisa Morton, and three very individual cats. Ricky is into Hong Kong films, FPS shooters, experimental anything and reading, reading, reading. You can catch his blog. March 21, 2011 Please note: If you find the color of the text hard to read, please click on 'Printer-friendly' and black text will appear on a white background.