New 2D Animation Software to be released
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
180 bucks and you can't even draw or construct your own characters?! HAHAHA! Come on folks, Smith Micro took a fair bashing over it's pricing, strange how this has been skirted over, eh...?
It looks like a 'tool' for people who want to make animations but don't want to animate. Fair enough if you want to make a puppet show, but I'm just saying it's does not appear to be made to entice animators.
How many times did that guy say 'import' in the demo reel? heh
It looks like a 'tool' for people who want to make animations but don't want to animate. Fair enough if you want to make a puppet show, but I'm just saying it's does not appear to be made to entice animators.
How many times did that guy say 'import' in the demo reel? heh
I'm away to try the trial.
Last edited by benecosse on Thu May 05, 2016 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I bought Crazy Talk 6 Standard for $50. There is no "One tool to do it all". I'm doing some stop motion animation with action figures at present; with Crazy Talk I can have close-ups of the puppets' faces appear to be alive, and moving (admittedly rather poorly at present) in lip-sync. Not only that, it's ridiculously easy to set up and the program does most of the work for you. Take a look: Hellboy test.crsP wrote:180 bucks and you can't even draw or construct your own characters?! HAHAHA! Come on folks, Smith Micro took a fair bashing over it's pricing, strange how this has been skirted over, eh...?
It looks like a 'tool' for people who want to make animations but don't want to animate. Fair enough if you want to make a puppet show, but I'm just saying it's does not appear to be made to entice animators.
How many times did that guy say 'import' in the demo reel? heh
I spent $50 on this because I can't do it in AS. That's a lot cheaper than upgrading to AS7, which has a lot of stuff I'm *not* interested in. Plus I get to try out Crazy Talk Animator for free. And as for only being able to import artwork -- there are a lot of people on this forum who would like AS to do *that* better, including me.
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
I think bones in AS is better
Last edited by benecosse on Thu May 05, 2016 6:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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neeters_guy
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It's almost eerie how lifelike the face moves around once you apply the control cage. I think judicious use of this tool could save a lot of time. I don't plan on getting this at present, but I'd be curious to know how your work turns out.jahnocli wrote:...close-ups of the puppets' faces appear to be alive, and moving
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InfoCentral
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I don't know of anyone who bashed Anime Studio Pro over its MSRP. What people were really pissed about was Smith Micro's upgrade pricing. They continue to take a bashing over that every time upgrades become available and for good reason.crsP wrote:HAHAHA! Come on folks, Smith Micro took a fair bashing over it's pricing, strange how this has been skirted over, eh...?
Anime Studio Pro and Crazy Talk Animator are about the same price but it costs me $129 to upgrade ASP and only $89 for CTA. Toon Boon Studio's MSRP is higher than both but cost me only $79 to upgrade.
But Smith Micro has sales which make upgrades reasonable. I took advantage of the Black Friday pricing of 60% off and both new and upgrade were priced at $80. While this might mean a bit of waiting, and while yeah, it WOULD be "respectful" of customers to not make them wait and hunt for a good deal, it still works out in the end. Since the basic MSRP difference is so great, upgrade costs may be higher than the other guys, but the developers DO need to make some money to pay for working on the software.InfoCentral wrote:I don't know of anyone who bashed Anime Studio Pro over its MSRP. What people were really pissed about was Smith Micro's upgrade pricing. They continue to take a bashing over that every time upgrades become available and for good reason.crsP wrote:HAHAHA! Come on folks, Smith Micro took a fair bashing over it's pricing, strange how this has been skirted over, eh...?
Anime Studio Pro and Crazy Talk Animator are about the same price but it costs me $129 to upgrade ASP and only $89 for CTA. Toon Boon Studio's MSRP is higher than both but cost me only $79 to upgrade.
Perhaps if the application gets popular enough, you'll see upgrade prices adjusted to reflect that...
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Change is inevitable, growth is optional.
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Change is inevitable, growth is optional.
Life is short, enjoy the adventure!
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InfoCentral
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Yeah, that is basically what I do. I wait til there is a deal going on and I purchase it when the price comes down to a reasonable upgrade cost. The problem is that you have to wait and hop on it when it comes around. There are a lot of loyalists that do pay the full upgrade price as soon as a new version is announced.Mozbo wrote:While this might mean a bit of waiting, and while yeah, it WOULD be "respectful" of customers to not make them wait and hunt for a good deal, it still works out in the end.
When I said 'not made to entice animators' I wasn't making a divide between youtubers or studios. It's not about professionals versus amateurs. The observation was that, whatever your skill level at animating, that it was more akin to a 'Poser' for 2d. I.e they have deliberately omitted drawing tools so there is more reliance on purchasing 'content' to club together your short. Some people want exactly that - judge the popularity of Poser to see, but it's a pain for those who want to create their own ideas from scratch.
Jahnocli, that was sort of my point. As the other person said, the facial morphing was the most interesting part [although the example in the video did not look satisfying - unless they were going for zombie like]. So that begs the question, if you are an AS user [even debut], why pay the full whack for the animator, when you can just get the 'normal' Crazy Talk for far less?
And although the narrator mentioned importing many times, I didn't catch the file types you could import with CTA. Can it import swf [even if it's rasterised]? To me that is [as well as SVG] the major omission in ASP concerning import\export.
And I too waited and got the cheap upgrade deal. You can't complain, because from past experience you know you can eventually get it at a lower price. I think it's a good system. Those who absolutely need the new features right away, will be prepared to pay for them. Those with patience or like to wait to see what bugs creep out will get it at a price they are more comfortable with. I've never paid the initial RRP for a console - but look at how many people were prepared to pay 1000 bucks for the PS3 when it was first released.
Jahnocli, that was sort of my point. As the other person said, the facial morphing was the most interesting part [although the example in the video did not look satisfying - unless they were going for zombie like]. So that begs the question, if you are an AS user [even debut], why pay the full whack for the animator, when you can just get the 'normal' Crazy Talk for far less?
And although the narrator mentioned importing many times, I didn't catch the file types you could import with CTA. Can it import swf [even if it's rasterised]? To me that is [as well as SVG] the major omission in ASP concerning import\export.
And I too waited and got the cheap upgrade deal. You can't complain, because from past experience you know you can eventually get it at a lower price. I think it's a good system. Those who absolutely need the new features right away, will be prepared to pay for them. Those with patience or like to wait to see what bugs creep out will get it at a price they are more comfortable with. I've never paid the initial RRP for a console - but look at how many people were prepared to pay 1000 bucks for the PS3 when it was first released.
I don't know if anybody is truly interested or not, but I did purchase the Pro version of the product, and after spending a couple of days with it over the holiday weekend, I wrote up my Initial Impressions and posted it in the Reallusion forum:
I've spent a couple of days playing around with the application, and there are quite a few things to like, and a few things to dislike.
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...
I've spent a couple of days playing around with the application, and there are quite a few things to like, and a few things to dislike.
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...
Absolutely. These are key. Having a closed system is unbelievably short-sighted.wizaerd wrote:...the first glaring omission is the ability to custom create a sprite based character...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...
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?