Veteran Cartoon Animator user and developer Garry Pye has been working with Cartoon Animator (CTA) for over a decade and has made the journey from casual animator to the role of 2D Community Manager for Reallusion. Now working alongside his 15 year old daughter Maddison, together they sat down to showcase just how easy the new Cartoon Animator 5.2 Motion Pilot makes 2D animation.
With a layered scene setup in Stage Mode, Garry and Maddison demonstrate the tools and features of Motion Pilot and how anyone can now produce real time smooth, professional results in minutes.
Cartoon Animator has long been the easiest and fastest way to create 2D animation. With Cartoon Animator you can produce quality projects in no time, regardless of your skill level in animation. Cartoon Animator makes animating easy for everyone, and today we’re going to show you how.
With the latest update to Cartoon Animator 5.2, we see the introduction of Motion Pilot, which gives you total control over the movement of your actors and props, controlled in real time using mouse movements, with variable parameters set by you.
Motion Pilot gets rid of the need for hours of keyframing your animation, because now you can control your characters like puppets using your mouse, while you record the motion. Motion Pilot is more like acting than animating. It makes everything easier and faster, but more importantly it makes animating so much fun for people of all ages and skill levels. Without any previous knowledge or experience of 2D animation, anyone can use Motion Pilot to create smooth results in minutes.
In the screenshot above we have a scene set up in Stage Mode. This scene was bought in as a Photoshop PSD file, maintaining its layers so we can move our actors around inside the scene, both in front of and behind objects and then move our camera about to create a sense of depth to our scene.
You can instantly switch to 3D view to see where all your characters and prop elements sit on the stage, as shown below.
To introduce an actor to your scene, you can simply drag and drop them from your Content Manager. By adding any one of the hundreds of premade motions to your actor, we could have our scuba diver swim instantly, without the need to keyframe his movement or draw individual frames. Cartoon Animator‘s premade motions do all the hard work and give perfect results every time.
With Motion Pilot, you can now make the scuba diver automatically swim as you pilot him around the screen using your mouse. In Motion Pilot, there is a section called Motion. Check the Blend Motion box, then drag and drop your swim motion onto the text box. If you only want him to swim forwards, scroll up to Face Cursor, and turn that off so he doesn’t flip direction as he swims.
Position your scuba diver to where he will begin in your animation and then before recording the screen you can select practice so you can rehearse you motion. Once you click Preview, move your mouse over the scuba diver and hit the space bar and watch him come to life and swim, following your mouse movement in real time.
You can change the speed at which an actor moves using the Speed slider.
Once you have rehearsed your animation, do the same again, only this time hit Record, to capture all of your characters animation in real time. Moving your character around feels more like playing than animating, as you become the actor and put your performance into their motions.
From frame zero, hit Play on the timeline and watch your new animation playback. What would have taken hours of tedious keyframing and animation skills has been completed in mere seconds thanks to Motion Pilot and has produced the smoothes result possible.
Even after you have completed many frames of animation, Cartoon Animator allows you to rewind through your project and add new animation or even alter the animation you have created so far.
The octopus actor in our project has Spring Bones built into his body rig, which you can apply yourself to any CTA actor. Spring Bones allow character parts like limbs, hair and accessories to wobble and bounce about in real time automatically, with no need for keyframing from the animator. Spring Bones dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to produce 2D animation and at the same time provide realistic and smooth motion results.
Instead of adding a motion to the octopus like we did with the scuba diver, this time we were able to be the puppeteer and move him about while we record his movements in real time. After recording the motion of the octopus, we could playback our animation to see your octopus and scuba diver swimming together.
Animation has never been so easy or fun! You can control any character or prop using Pilot Motion. Moving them about like a puppet and just recording it to make an animation in real time.
We were able to pilot the fish in our scene using the same real time puppetry applied to the octopus. In addition, using a Motion Pilot feature called Flock Settings, we could make duplicates of the fish and have them follow the leader. Flock Settings give the option to select multiple items as the children, following the parents with preset time delays and in various patterns. This is the ideal way to create animations of groups like swarming insects or random swirling leaves blowing about in the wind. Again, the type of animation that would otherwise require a high degree of skill and a large volume of time to execute, can be done in seconds.
Even though Motion Pilot makes animation fast, fun and easy, it is still an incredibly powerful tool that gives you total control over your animation. For instance, we saw that Maddison and I could animate the Octopus in real time just by moving the mouse around. But even after the motion is recorded, we can still go back and add more character animation to our actors.
Using Cartoon Animator‘s 360 Head function, we were able to make the octopus turn its head in the direction it’s swimming. We could keyframe the rotation of the actors head and even add in facial animation like blinking and lip syncing to voiceover tracks.
Spring Bones were easily added to the flat PNG fish props to make them move in a more dynamic way, as shown in the image below. Then, using the Wave function of Motion Pilot, we were able to have the fish move automatically, controlled by parameters we set. For instance, by adjusting the Y-axis of the Move Amplitude, the fish will now bob up and down in the water on its own. And changing the Loop Duration determines how fast or slow this motion is. You can even tell Cartoon Animator whether you want the fishes movement to be constant or random.
As well as puppeting your actors in real time, you can create a specific path that your actors can follow, so you have total control over their movement. After plotting a path with mouse clicks, you can link your actor to the path, which it will follow as the animation plays, and you can determine how long it takes for the actor to progress along that path. In the image below, the red line is the path that has been manually drawn for the fish to follow.
Your actors don’t have to just move side to side and up and down either. In Cartoon Animator you can build your scenes so they have camera depth. All of the elements in your scene are layered, from close to camera, to all the way off in the distance. This means you can have your actors move in front of and behind objects and control this during live recording with Motion Pilot by adjusting the Z-axis. We were even able to use the Scale function to make actors become larger as they move closer to camera, and smaller as they move further away.
There are lots of different ways you can control your actors with Motion Pilot, and changing the parameters for how they move is fast and easy, and give instant results that you can preview before recording your final movie.
Finally, you can decide whether you want your actor to move in time with your mouse or using the Lazy Mouse function, you can have the actor follow along at a slower, smoother pace.
You are not limited to just the actors in your scene being controlled by Motion Pilot. You can control other scene elements as well, to help bring your scene to life in a dynamic way. When we set up our scene and added the sponge as a static prop, we were able to add our own custom bones to the sponge to give it a simple skeleton. Then we turned some of those bones into Spring Bones, giving them flexibility. Using Motion Pilot, we were able to set the rotation on the prop so it gently moves side to side, as if affected by the water current, and it does this automatically as our scene plays.
By making the Tween frames Random, the motion looks more natural, and then we can set the Loop duration to make the sponge gently sway about during our scene, while the rest of the action takes place around it.
You can apply this style of automated motion to any item in your scene, meaning everything can move in its own unique way. We could even apply the wave motion to the water current prop at the top, creating the illusion of the water constantly moving. By applying Spring Bones to this prop, it appears to flex and wobble about when we applied a simple Wave motion to it, helping to bring our scene to life.
Getting the exact look you want is as easy as changing the values in the menu, for instant results. You can make them as realistic or as exaggerated as you want!
Maddison and I had so much fun working together on this Motion Pilot project. Anyone of any animation skill level, advanced, amateur or even zero experience, can be producing quality animation instantly with CTA5 now. You don’t have to do anything but have fun, because Cartoon Animator and Motion Pilot do all the work for you, making the process feel more like playing than animating.
Learn about Cartoon Animator:
https://www.reallusion.com/cartoon-animator/
Discover CTA Motion Pilot:
https://www.reallusion.com/cartoon-animator/puppet-animation.html
Follow Garry Pye:
https://www.facebook.com/garrypyeanimations/
