Cartoon Animator 4 (CT4)

[3doutlaw]

For a beginner though, would CA4 be the way to go? The investment in the Pipeline product alone is hundreds of dollars cheaper than Moho (even for an Moho upgrade like my 11.x would be)...it is very active development, and seems to have a growing user base? Any word on if Moho Next will provide any "Jump Back in with the new Mgmt!" offers?

EDIT after sleeping on it: ...then again, if I've learned anything over the years, is to use what you have, and if you stick with it, only then upgrade. Buying an upgrade alone, won't make you better. So installed my AS 11.2, and forging ahead!

[pihms]

Cartoon Animator 4 is not as capable or as versatile as Moho. It makes it fairly easy to slap a simple animation with characters that can be matched preset motions. Most of the custom characters that you would need to create would need to be originally created in a program such as Photoshop, Affinity Designer, or similar that will save in a psd format. CA4’s ability appears to easily create animation of Photos, make 360 turns, and puppet creation, but the simplicity and attractive interface really doesn’t create as finished of a product as Moho. I have been using both for quite a while now. If I’m trying to create original and unique work, I’ll create it in either Affinity Designer or Moho first. For a good finished product, Moho is wonderful. You may even want to play around with their 30 day free trial, no credit card needed.

Greenlaw pretty much summed up all of the main issues with it, pros and cons.

For a beginner, go for it. You may even enjoy some simple practice with Pencil 2D (free) Krita (free), or Synfig (free).

[arglborps]

I've purchased Cartoon Animator 4 for a different project doing explainer videos. For that purpose CA4 is really nice, but if you want to do anything beyond that with it, it gets horribly cumbersome. Even editing and tweaking the pre-made motion capture actions and movement isn't as quick and smooth as it could be, and if you want to create your own character using a Photoshop template, the process might be straight forward (as long as it's a humanoid or 4-legged animal), but you'll find that many parts just don't move/deform "quite right", and tweaking that is close to impossible.

For cheap explainers that might be sufficient, but in the end CA4 is a pre-packaged tool with a limited purpose and if you want to improve the quality and detail of the animation, you'll quickly run into walls with it, and you'll be way better off with Moho. Depending on what you want to do you could start with Moho Debut and upgrade when your needs have grown?

[SimplSam]

So they now have CTA version 4.5 - which includes the ability to export transparent video. They are making a big thing about this (as they do), but the same could previously be achieved with PNG exports.

I think for some people it's easier to comprehend mixing live action video with animation when using these exported transparent .MOV files.

[wizaerd]

The way I see it, Moho is an application for animators, whereas Cartoon Animator is an application for animation. The difference being Moho offers many more professional benefits for animators, from designing/drawing custom characters, custom rigging, effects, etc... Cartoon Animator is built for people who are not animators, but still want to do some light animation. As far as their character animations, it is much easier to build and rig a character in CA since they have standardized skeletons and rigs for characters. Easy enough to use that somebody with no animation experience could put together a character animation relatively quickly and easily.

I have both programs, and I typically use CA more often since it is so much easier to get custom, animated characters animated. But I really enjoy tinkering in Moho, playing around with some of the more advanced things such as physics and effects.

[Greenlaw]

The way I see it, Moho is an application for animators, whereas Cartoon Animator is an application for animation.

I can see that, but the sad thing for me is that CA4 could be a program for animators too, if the developers choose to take it in that direction. So far, they seem strictly focused on the 'canned motion' and performance capture workflow.

I think CA4's standardized modular rigging system makes it very easy to set up rigs, and I would like to see the concept adapted to Moho in the future, but CA4 sure makes it difficult when you want/need to animate things by hand.

I'll continue to dabble with CA4 Pipeline when I have time, but for everyday production work, I'm sticking with Moho. Moho may not be as 'plug and play', but it's infinitely more flexible and capable for the type of animation I'm asked to create.

[wizaerd]

The way I see it, Moho is an application for animators, whereas Cartoon Animator is an application for animation.

I can see that, but the sad thing for me is that CA4 could be a program for animators too, if the developers choose to take it in that direction. So far, they seem strictly focused on the 'canned motion' and performance capture workflow.

I think CA4's standardized modular rigging system makes it very easy to set up rigs, and I would like to see the concept adapted to Moho in the future, but CA4 sure makes it difficult when you want/need to animate things by hand.

I'll continue to dabble with CA4 Pipeline when I have time, but for everyday production work, I'm sticking with Moho. Moho may not be as 'plug and play', but it's infinitely more flexible and capable for the type of animation I'm asked to create.

CA4.5 (and all previous versions) have a 2D Motion Key editor, for keyframing and creating your own motion clips. I actually find it a wee bit easier to keyframe animations in CA4.5 than in Moho...

[Greenlaw]

CA4.5 (and all previous versions) have a 2D Motion Key editor, for keyframing and creating your own motion clips. I actually find it a wee bit easier to keyframe animations in CA4.5 than in Moho...

Thanks for letting me know about the availability of 4.5. I'll update this weekend and check it out.

One of my big issues with CA4 was that it wouldn't let me set the default keyframe Transition mode (or Interpolation mode in Moho) and, maybe even worse, it wouldn't let me change the Transition mode for multiple selected keys like Moho does. Every keyframe had to be changed individually. This workflow was just way too tedious for me, and other users in the Reallusion forum confirmed this shortcoming. I'm hoping the devs will address this before too long because it's probably the main reason many animators don't take it seriously.

I also didn't like that I could only animate at 30 fps, and not 24 fps which is the standard in the industry. I'm aware that the program can export footage at different frame rates but that's not the same thing since it's altering the keyframes to do that. If I'm going to be exporting for 24 fps, I want to be sure I was animating at 24 fps. Being locked into 30 fps for animation may be fine for personal projects, but it's a non-starter for studio productions I've been involved with.

There were other UI-related things that annoyed me but I think these two were the main issues. Oh, and not having anything like Smart Bone Actions was another big one.

That said, I do want to use CA 4.5 for a personal project I'm working on, in which the 'homebrew' mocap workflow and quality is going to be ideal. I agree that being able to mix motion clips like in a video editor is super convenient. Most of my past experience was with Motion Builder, but I replaced that a couple of years ago with iPi Mocap Studio and Reallusion's iClone 7/3DX Pipeline. I haven't done much with iClone yet but I like working in it, and that led me to getting Reallusion's CA4 Pipeline last year. (I was also motivated by Smith Micro's mishandling of Moho back then. Thank goodness Moho bounced back this year with the acquisition by Lost Marble!)

Anyway, while I won't be using CA 4.5 for the type of hand keyframed animation I make with Moho, I'm still gonna make use of it.

[Karl Toon]

Interesting to see this topic still going. So, time to put my opinion into the pot.
I own both Cartoon Animator 4.5 and MOHO 13.5 Pro. From the off, I am going to say that I feel MOHO to be a much more stable product than Cartoon Animator. Since MOHO 13.5 I have had NO crashes at all. I wish I could say the same for Cartoon Animator 4. Cartoon Animator 4 has lots of bells and whistles which, if they worked properly, make for easy animation. I am running both products on a high-end PC. Since Cartoon Animator was rebranded from Crazytalk Animator 3 I have found Live Face on iPhone and also Face 3D Tracker to be a complete waste of time as nothing records at real speed and the lag in the recorded animation makes it totally unusable. I've had constant crashes with it at the most inopportune times, causing me to have to recreate whole files. Cartoon Animator 4 also has plenty of limitations on creativity when compared to MOHO 13.5. I learnt CA4 before moving onto MOHO, and find MOHO a much more interesting package to use. I also think that if you are using your own characters, rather than premade ones, MOHO is a much simpler process for rigging characters.
For rapid development like a quick explainer video or 30 second animated joke, Cartoon Animator is great, but for anything more complex MOHO is much better. Is it worth owning both? In hindsight, I would say, "no". If anyone ever asked me which to buy, I would say MOHO. Going forward, I doubt I will purchase any later versions of Cartoon Animator, but I will definitely keep going with MOHO.

[chucky]

Thanks MadDog, that was very informative.
CA4 looks like it has a bunch of good tricks and is certainly well marketed but, all those add ons ( and the way that works) is unwieldy and the upselling makes me suspicious.
I have tried it a couple of times but found it unsatisfactory too, I am glad to hear from someone who has more extensive experience.

[SimplSam]

Looks like Reallusion may soon be releasing Cartoon Animator 5 - which includes Spring (dynamic) Bones, improved free form Mesh Deformation and support for Vectors (import, transforms, mesh manipulation, recolor - no drawing/nor point manipulation). They are also consolidating CTA5 into a single product (no more pipeline), and withdrawing support for Macs.

[arglborps]

Withdrawing support for Macs.

Well, good riddance then. They also never released an Apple Silicon native version of v4, so I saw the writing on the wall.

With the new M1/M2 and their graphic cores, neural engines they could've done so much interesting stuff. Their facial tracking real-time animation tool required the iOS app, I'm pretty sure that was the neural engine doing it's facial and facial expression recognition – they could've ported that to the new Apple Silicon Macs as an integrated tool using the built-in webcam, but no.

[Greenlaw]

Looks like Reallusion may soon be releasing Cartoon Animator 5 - which includes Spring (dynamic) Bones, improved free form Mesh Deformation and support for Vectors (import, transforms, mesh manipulation, recolor - no drawing/nor point manipulation).

That's very interesting...I'll check out what's new with Cartoon Animator 5 but, TBH, after many years of supporting the product I may decide to pass on this upgrade.

I became especially interested in CA back when Smith-Micro abandoned Moho, but unfortunately I found that hand keyframing animation in CA is awkward compared to Moho, and I don't think the devs are interested in improving that. But to be fair, CA's focus has always been on mocap animation, not hand keyframing, and that's how it's been marketed.

I think CA is a good program for what it was designed for but personally I don't have a need for 2D mocap animation so maybe it's not the right program for me.

Besides, Moho is back now and thriving under Lost Marble. (Thank goodness!)

Thanks sharing the info SimplSam.

[maxd]

looks like CTA5 is out, confusing with all the addons and what not... but looks a good release...