Adobe Character Animator vs Anime Studio Pro

[heiseman]

So, this will be interesting:
http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/201 ... ealed.html

I think it will be a long time before Adobe can catch up to to ASP with advanced features and what-not. And that live-cam stuff looks a bit gimmicky. But, looking forward to how a bit of healthy competition will shape the future of ASP.

[jayfaker]

I think it's too early to tell what kind of product CA really is and what it may become. At the moment it's really just a face tracker for face animation and a mouse tracker for everything else. All other functionality will come from third-party developers. For now, it seems more of a stand-alone tool than a full-featured software package.

Is it valuable? I think the face tracker will be useful for animators needing to create countless hours of video to get to the top of Youtube's suggestion lists again. Lot's of cheap crap is more valuable to Youtube than a couple of pieces of gold, unfortunately. And who knows, maybe someone will develop a way to import the CA tracking data into ASP. That'd be pretty cool.

Anyway, I don't think CA will be a true competitor to ASP any time soon. There are plenty of other competitors to watch out for already, though.

[heiseman]

I understand there will be character rigging tools for advanced users though... I think they just focused on the face tracking feature as it's more of a selling point in their opinion.

[Lukas]

I'd love to play with this.

The motion capture stuff is horrible for animation, but I can imagine it's awesome for kids theater or concerts and stuff.

[chucky]

Woah...

[InfoCentral]

Adobe has been in the animation business for a long time with Flash. They are not new to this. As for their mocap in 2D going forward, Crazy Talk Animator already is doing full body.

[Víctor Paredes]

It produces me a similar feeling than the one I have with Character Wizard. I would never use that seriously.
I don't think After Effects team should be focused on that kind of features. It looks rather a cell app than a "real" feature.

[Víctor Paredes]

Actually, I'm looking CrazyTalk Animator and it has that kind of work very well. Again, it's not a software I would use in any "pro" work. It's more something funny to play with my cousins.
That's why it looks so odd as part of After Effects, which is a fantastic "pro" software. Anyway, of course it's just my opinion

[chucky]

I dunno , I get a whole different feeling with the character wizz-hard, yeeesh.
The major difference being actual implementation rather than concept.

If you don't like 'the idea ' of performance capture - then you are already prejudiced , despite that , the Character Animator looks like (even in beta )that it actually works and is very customisable and full featured.

On the other hand the character wizard looks like development was finished before it was half way complete is so limited in its application , and barely usable especially for any task.
The character wizard concept has worth , but the implementation has a negative value.

[herbert123]

Adobe has been in the animation business for a long time with Flash. They are not new to this.

Indeed. They were quite effective in running Flash into the ground as far as character animation is concerned, what with the removal of the bone tool (and other useful animation tools) in the latest versions a couple of years ago. Flash used to be one of the major animation tools in the animation industry - Adobe was very helpful in degrading Flash, and removing it from that position, and pretty much relinquished the animation market to tools such as ToonBoom.

It seems Adobe switched Flash development more towards game dev/design.

As for the new CA tool: let's wait and see what happens. Adobe started/acquired many promising products before, only to drop them a few years later: Brackets, LiveMotion, Fireworks, Freehand, that 3d tool (I forget its name), to name but a few.

[Greenlaw]

Speaking of CrazyTalk, here's a little test my daughter Sienna and I made two years ago:



She was a bit creeped out by it, and I can't say I blame her. I, on the other hand, thought it was kinda neat for how little effort was we put into this test--the head tilting, the shifty eyes, it was entirely on autopilot. Never quite figured out what I wanted to do the tech though.

At the time I thought I could use CrazyTalk to generate mouth shapes for 2D or even 3D animations but it was just a little too weird looking--reminded me of those vintage Clutch Cargo and Space Angel shows. (Seriously, real mouths on cartoons are just creepy.)

G.

[jahnocli]

Ooooh -- that *IS* creepy! I did something similar with a Hellboy action figure a while back; I'll see if I can dig it out...

EDIT

Here it is:

Hellboy speaks!

In case the dialogue isn't obvious, the 2 phrases are:
"How'm I ever going to get a girl? I drive around in a garbage truck", and
"Don't get psychic with me, fella"

Not great lip-sync by any means, but a quick and dirty way of getting an action figure to speak.

[Greenlaw]

That's pretty neat..and creepy too. Thanks for sharing that.

[jayfaker]

I finally watched the character animator video and I'm now convince that for now, the biggest impact it will have is on youtube videos. "Animators" will finally be able to, like video game players/life commenters, make a half an hour of content a day, or whatever, so that they can be placed at the top of youtube's suggestion lists again and have a steady flow of income from advertisers. Will it be amazing animation? Not at all. It may have some pretty illustrations or cool rigs and particle/physics/automated tricks from time to time, but I'm sure the animation will feel automated and that won't change for years if ever. Maybe developers will even automate squash and stretch, IK, anticipation, and follow through. Ultimately it may be a cool tool where you could animate in real time in passes. First pass the body, then the face, then anticipation, etc. I think it'll take a while to get there.

But for now it'll make "animated" series much more profitable on youtube.

[Greenlaw]

I think you're right but it's not necessarily going to be easy. If good design sense is applied, and the content relies more on witty dialog over action and sight gags, it could work. But once the content creator has established his technical workflow, the really hard part will be in keeping up the quality and freshness of the writing because, in the long run, that's all you have. Not saying that to discourage anybody, just stating that it will certainly be challenging.

And I would love to see somebody pull it off!

G.