How to make an animated cartoon of yourself | Adobe Character Animate CC

hello there and welcome in this video i'm going to be showing you how you can take a picture of yourself and convert it into an animated character just like the one you're seeing right now using photoshop and adobe character animate cc this is coming as a request from my previous video where a number of you wanted to know how i created that character which looked like me now there are two general ways i know of that you can do this using character animate cc the first is using the inbuilt characterizer tool which is quite easy but it won't get you as good as an effect like the one that you saw in that video i'm gonna cover that in another tutorial and the second way which was how my character was made was to use the pen tool either in photoshop or illustrator to carve around different parts of a photo until eventually your you create a vector file that looks like that picture from my experience this takes some time to do and then you also have to master how to use the pen tool and in my opinion i think you need some kind of artistic side of yourself to actually get that vector file to look just like you but don't worry because we are going to be getting rid of this complex pen tool looking guy i have a little trick for you that i feel almost anyone can follow along to create a cartoon version of yourself and then we're going to go ahead and create a puppet out of that and the tutorial starts right now all right so the very first thing we want to do is take some pictures obviously and the numerous amount of pictures you can take depending on how expressive you want your character to be but for the bm minimum we're going to need at least two pictures one with yourself doing a neutral expression and then another one with your eyes closed we're going to be using this to do the blinking of the eyes but besides this you can do a whole lot more different kinds of pictures like for example a thumbs up thumbs down smiling sad face and if you wanted to use your actual mouth to do the mouth movement uh you can do different you have to do different lips position and i'm going to be talking about some of these as we go along in the video but for this tutorial we're going to keep it simple with just those two minimum pictures so a neutral face and one with the eyes closed so once we have that taken you want to go ahead and photoshop and click on open and then look for wherever you've stored your picture and open it so that opens the picture in photoshop so we're going to take out the background and to do that you just click on the object selection tool right here on photoshop so you want to go ahead and just click and drag around your image so photoshop is going to be using machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically locate your picture from the background sometimes it misses out some piece of this and you can fix that by subtracting it for example if it selected too much like it did in the hand here by just holding option or out depending on if your mark on windows and then just click and drag around the area which it didn't select so well and that will subtract from it and in case it missed some areas you can then hold shift on your keyboard and just do the same thing around the area where it missed that and it will go ahead and fix that once you have that done you want to click on the little mask icon right here and that should automatically separate your background from your image so the very next thing we're going to need to do now is actually apply the cartoon effect to that picture so that it looks more like a cartoon and that is going to be one of the easiest thing you're gonna need to do because if you look down in the description of this video i have a gift for you uh which is a photoshop action that is gonna do that for you automatically in case you're wondering what a photoshop action is uh it just lets you record actions that you're doing within photoshop whatever it is and then you can play this back later in case you don't want to keep repeating the same action over and over again and in my case it allows me to share that with you so that you can uh just play that and it repeats the step that i took to create the cartoon effect so if you want to head down to the description of this video right below and click on that link that says uh photoshop pop ad action and then download that and once you have that downloaded you can come back to the video and i'm to show you how to load it up onto photoshop and to use it to create your cartoon effect so once you have that downloaded you want to click on the actions the little play button on photoshop and if you cannot see that you just go to windows and click on action and that should open that so once you're there you want to click on the little menu icon to the corner here and then click on load action now go to wherever you downloaded that and just click on open that should automatically open something called ec pop ads so that is the action that i've saved so the next thing we want to do is just rename the layer to say layer one that's because when i recorded this the layer that i did that on was named layer one so once you've done that just click on the easy pop act effect and just hit the play button and that's going to do a number of things and by the end of that you should have uh this cotton looking like image so depending on the tone of your skin this might work right away without you having to do anything to it i noticed that on darker skin tones it kind of struggles a little bit and would have to clean it up a little a little bit but if you have a lighter skin tone you might be able to apply this one time and it just looks okay so let's just go ahead and let me explain a few things that are going on here so if you look down to the layers you will notice two layers one called line at and the bottom one called color so these are layers with smart objects so the very first one called line art is simply kind of tracing around your picture so it almost looks like you're using a pencil to trace an outline around your picture to give it that uh cartoonish effect and the one at the bottom is creating a watercolor kind of effect on your pictures so that you've used a watercolor and brush to paint around that and if you merge both of them it gives you this pop-out cartoonish effect that you've seen right here and in case there might be any issues with it maybe it's not looking right just edit any of the parameters that you see right here at the bottom just double click on those and play around with them until um it looks good to you so if you notice for mine uh we have a little bit of things that look like dots around my face uh that's because again because of the skin tone so we're gonna clean that up it's quite easy there's several ways to do that so what you want to do uh for that is just click on the top layer that says line act and then click right here on the erase tool and then you just want to start clicking it's going to ask you to rasterize this layer you can say yes this just means that you can no longer edit the settings of the layer i'm just going to go ahead and just use the erase tool to just wipe around everywhere that we have these little edges so the next thing i want to do is fix some of the uneven skin tones that you can see in the skin and that's quite easy to do to do that i'm going to go ahead go ahead and select the eye drop tool and we use this to select just some part of the skin tones color that we want to use and once i've done that i'm gonna go and use the paint bucket tool and then i'm just gonna click on any patches that i want to fix for the first time it's going to ask to rasterize this layer and i'm just going to say yes and then i'll just go ahead and click on all the patches of the face that has some hot spots so that it's a little bit even while i'm at that i'm also going to fix the jacket seems like it didn't pick uh some of the blue so just pick that blue color and then use the paint bucket tool to just fix that and there you go all right there we have a pretty good looking cartoon character the next thing we want to do now is convert this into a puppet and a little tip for you if you actually don't want your character to look like a cartoon you could actually just take the picture and move to this next step so let's say for example you wanted to do a pop out of a celebrity's face with your voice talking you would take their picture and move to this next step without converting them to a cartoon if you don't want it to look a finish that's a little tip for you there so now let's head over to character animate and begin to convert that picture into a puppet so once in character animate we want to open back our welcome screen and you can do that by clicking on window and clicking welcome so that opens up this welcome screen and what you want to do is click on see more which takes you to adobe's puppet repository and we want to download the blank puppet we're going to be replacing it with our own email once downloaded you're going to see two versions of the puppet you want to open the photoshop version of it so once you open this puppet on character animate and enable your camera you should be able to control it with your head your eyes and you can use the mouse to control the hands just like you would we're going to be editing this to replace it with our puppet to do this you want to go to blank and click on right click and do edit original this would open this up on photoshop so when you notice to the right here there are a bunch of layers and bunch of groups these are named very very specifically so that it can work with character animate and you have to use some certain naming convention which is why it's always advisable to use a template to do this we're going to be replacing uh each of these with our own image and i'm gonna walk you through that right now okay so the very first thing we're gonna be working on is the face and we're gonna be spending about probably 80 percent of our time on here because this is where most of the work is so what i want you to do is go back to that image which we created a cartoon of and then i want you to use the object selection tool remember that tool and then roughly just select around the head it doesn't have to be too accurate and then you just want to cut that by hitting ctrl x or command x on your keyboard and then next we want to go to uh our poppet and click on the group that says face and i just want you to just paste that on there and then adjust that that looks a little bit freaky but don't worry we're going to be replacing the eyes too and fixing everything as we go along all right so i'm just going to go ahead and turn off the eye layers so just click on the little icon that looks like an eye i'll turn off the right eye and the left eye so we can start working on our eyes so if i zoom in here i want you to go ahead and click on what is called the laser tool and then around your eye make sure that your face layer is selected just follow around the edges of the eye just roughly uh it doesn't have to be too accurate and once you've done that hit the delete key on the keyboard to delete that and then go ahead and do the same thing for your left eyes just follow that roughly around the edges and hit the delete key to remove that so once you're done with that you want to select the object selection tool and just roughly select around the eyes to select the lead and the reason why we're doing this is that we're going to use the lead to cover the pool build so that once you're moving your profiles around uh it doesn't come off out of your face and i'll show you that in a second so once i'm done with that i'm just going to go back to these and paste it in here ctrl v and then move it to fit back in place wherever it's supposed to fit now there might be a little bit of the rough space that doesn't fit properly but don't worry we'll fix that in a second you can use the eye drop tool to select your skin tone and then select the brush tool i will just quickly just change the size of that and then go to the lead group delete where it says replace and i'll create a new layer at the bottom and rename that to lead field because we're going to use this layer to fill the bottom of the lid and then using the brush tool just draw around the areas that still have a little bit of white we're going to just paint all around that and also paint around the top again we're doing all of this to make sure that the purple doesn't go out of the eyes all right this is looking pretty good so far next we're gonna work on the purple and for that i just need to go back to that image that we made at cartoon and uh we're gonna cut out the purple if you want for this you can actually uh take a picture of your eyes wide open so you can get your pupils properly uh so what i will need you to do is just go to that and use the object selection tool and we want to just select around the eyes just roughly again and it's gonna cut and pick that and then we're gonna go back to our puppet once we're there we're gonna look for a folder that says right puppy so once we have that we're gonna do ctrl v to paste in there and align that to have our pupil and for the left purple i'm just gonna also go back to the folder that says left pupil and paste it right in there and align it properly that is looking pretty good so far so next we're going to work on the lead the left lead remember we didn't do that so for that i'm going to click on the face layer actually let me rename this to face because it just says layer one and using again the object selection tool like we did last time i'm just gonna select roughly around the eyes for it to select that and then we're gonna go back to the lead and just paste that on there and align it properly and then now we're going to just use again the feel like we did for the the right eyes i use the brush tool to fill that up so that it protects the pupil and you don't see a rubble popping out because that will look very weird all right so we're making some good progress here next we're going to work on the eyeball and in this software the eyeball plays an important role because it acts as a boundary for your pupil so if you have an eyeball even if it's not visible an eyeball that is bigger than your eyes you're going to have your pupil going all over the place so you want to make sure that you keep the eyeball as close as possible to the eyes and i'm going to be showing you how to do that in a second so we're going to be using the pen tool to do this and to do that you just want to go ahead and click on the pen tool and once you've done that you also want to click on the foreground and change the foreground color to white because eyeballs are actually white okay and then i'm going to go to the right here and just select the layer that says right eyeballs and then i'm going to come back and just draw a shape around my eyes it doesn't have to be perfect just something close to the eyes just draw it a little bit around then i'm going to change that to a shape so that that gives us a a solid color so we're going to repeat the exact same thing for the left eyeball and that is what we look like so far so why don't we do ctrl save to save this and head over to character animate to see what this looks like as you can see now when i move my eyeballs my poop is sorry to the left and right it's moving with the character i don't know about you but we're making good progress and this makes me feel good so let's go ahead and finish up the rest of the face so next we're going to work on our eyebrows we're going to make them movable to do this you just want to make sure you're on the face layer make sure it's selected now you're going to use the object tool to select around the eyebrows and cut that with ctrl x once you've done that go to the layer that says right eyebrows right here we can delete the layer that is replaced and then we just paste that in here and rename it to right eyebrows all right so once that is done we can just align that to fit where it's supposed to be in and then because the eyebrows are going to be moving back and forth we want to make sure that once it moves you don't see that white spot uh below it so we're going to fill that up using the brush tool so select your face layer and just use the brush tool like we've done before to paint around that in fact i'm going to turn that eyebrow layer off just to make sure i've gotten all the other uh white spots that are below it so we're going to repeat the same process for the left one and save that and it's going to reflect on character animate so let's see what that looks like now as you can see if i move my eyebrows uh it's moving accordingly next we're moving to what is probably one of the most sophisticated part of a puppet which is the mouth lip sync but don't worry i'm going to break that down for you all right now so when you open uh the mouth group you're going to notice that it has several layers so what these are just simply different mouth sets and they're representing different types of shapes when you pronounce different words so what happens is that when you pronounce a word like ah and you have a mouth shape the software is automatically gonna detect that and it's gonna switch to that r shape you might notice that some of them have something that looks like a one and a two and that simply just tells the software that this mouth shape is an animated sequence so instead of it just switching to the frame of an r it's gonna switch to it's an animated a one and then goes to two so like ah to give it a more fluid kind of animation and like i said in the beginning of the video if you actually want to use your own mouth to to replace that with the smart shapes you'd have to take pictures with all these different mouth shapes apply the cartoon action that i gave you to them and then cut them out and place them in here i already showed you all that you need to do to do that uh because of how long that's gonna take when actually not gonna cover that in this tutorial instead we're gonna use the default uh mouth set that comes with this for the character i tried it out that it looks actually pretty good uh the only one we're gonna replace is the neutral mouth position which is just a line which doesn't look too realistic for a human being so if you're looking for a more human-like mouth set uh better than the one that you have here i'm gonna be putting down in the description a link to download the one that i used in my original character uh you're free to use that in whatever product you want to use you don't have to pay for that the only thing i asked back in return is that you hit that like button share the link to this video on your social media and subscribe to this channel that helps me grow the channel and it helps me continue to create content like the one you're watching right now so thank you for that other than that you're free to use it as you will uh but let's go ahead and let me show you how to actually replace some of the mouthpiece we're gonna do the neutral one so let's go ahead so this time around i'm gonna be using the lasso tool because the object select two cannot really select uh the leaves properly and with the face uh layer selected just go ahead and draw around your mouth and you want to cut that out with ctrl x so once you do that uh go ahead to uh the group the layer that says neutral and paste that in there and then what we're going to do is we're going to rename that layer to neutral and it's important to rename it exactly like this and then delete the old one so i want you to go ahead and click on the entire mouth group then press ctrl or command t on your keyboard to enable the scale tool and then we're just gonna click and drag around the edges just to scale it and make sure it fits properly with the new puppet so once that is done i'll just move back my neutral mouthpiece to also align with the rest of them alright so i'm going to save this and head back to character animate so now as i'm moving my lips you can see the leaves are moving properly and this looks pretty good so we're just gonna do one more thing and then we'll be done with the face so we're gonna go ahead and add the blinking to this do this what you want to do is go back to that picture that i asked you to take with your eyes closed and then you're just going to apply back the pop action to it once you've done that uh we're going to be using our object select tool to select around the eyes and so once you do that you want to go now to your puppet and locate your right eyes you're going to see a layer that says on the right eye that says blink so we're just going gonna paste that in there and we can delete the old one and we're gonna repeat the same process for our left eye and paste that in there so once we're done with this i'll save it and now if you go back to character animate and try to blink your eyes uh you should see it now blinking properly that's quite easy and with this we are done with the face of our character congratulations eighty percent of the work is already done so now we just need to add the arms and the body to the character and rig that so that shouldn't take very long so i'm gonna get a right to that and show you how to do that so the first thing i'm gonna do is to resize my canvas so it can fit the bigger body that we're gonna be putting in and to do that you go to image canvas size i'll set it to something like maybe 4000 by 300 this should fit my new image size that i have all right that looks good so then i'll go back to our original image the one where we took the head from and using the lasso tool i'll just cut slightly around the amp and then move it to about where the wrist is and then i'm going to cut that out and then using ctrl x from the keyboard i can cut this out from here and then move back to our puppet so wait on the body group you're gonna see where it is right arm so right here i'm gonna paste this uh new arm right here and then i'll adjust it slightly to about where i think it should fit and then i'm gonna rename it to right m and then delete uh the rest that says replace so i'm going to do the exact same thing for our left arm also and put it in our puppet all right so i'm going to go back and also cut out the rest of the body piece and then when we go back to our puppet you're going to see where it says tassel so let me go ahead and just hide uh some of these layers and actually also take out the pants because we're not gonna be using pants for this particular uh puppet today so i'm gonna paste it right there and then i'll adjust the location to fit right into the neck so let me just adjust it slightly okay that looks about good then next um i'm gonna adjust my arms so that they now fit the new uh body location all right that looks okay so let's do the left arm also all right looking good okay so next i'm gonna use the same lasso tool to cut out uh our left hand uh right hand sorry and then when i go to the right arm when you scroll down to the bottom you see where it says hand and then it says default so i'm going to just paste this new hand right in here and then just adjust its position to fit properly with the puppet and then we're gonna go ahead and just delete uh the previous one and then i'm gonna do the exact same thing also for the left arm the left hand okay so we have that fit properly and then we're just to go ahead and delete that so once you save that and go back to character animate um that should be loaded now properly so the first thing i want to do is just kill the image to fit uh within the scene so and if you do to the right here you use the scale and then i'll probably also change the position uh the y position to go to the bottom because we don't have pants for this character so now that that is done if i move the hands with the mouse it moves a little bit it's a little bit disjointed right now but we'll fix that and also you notice when i move my head also the entire body is moving so let's fix that first if i go to rig mode and then i click on the body group uh you will notice that we have two fixed uh handles which were misaligned so i'm just going to put them back where they were supposed to be uh you can consider this to be almost like weights that you're putting on the body to hold them down to the ground all right so let's go back to record mode and see what that looks like so if i move my head now okay that uh that looks better all right but uh there's still a few issues which we can fix let's start with the right um so the first thing i want to do is uh where we have this green uh line that says right arm i want to drag that and put it right where the arm attached to the body so when you see it's green it means it is attached so for the rest of the handles i'm just going to delete them so i can show you what's going on here so i'm going to add a handle first to identify the elbow so click that and put it right around where i think the elbow should be all right i think that's a good spot so i'm going to target as an elbow so when you see the stick tool right here if you click on that so it start that to be the elbow so i'm also going to tag my wrist click another handle in there and then target to be the wrist and then i'm going to make this one draggable so it means i can use this point to actually move the hands around if i click and drag it with my mouse so let's see what that looks like on the record mode so if i drag that you see it now moves it's completely disjointed and dislocated from the arm side but we're going to fix that right now so let me try to zoom in so you can see what i'm doing uh okay so right at the bottom you will have what is called the stick tool so i'm going to go ahead and add a bone to right where we have the arm connecting to the body and then i'm gonna do one more thing i'm gonna make this bone fixed so that it stops um moving out remember when i was moving the hand it was getting disjointed from the body so i'll make that fixed and then i'm gonna add two just regular bones so that our hand is less wiggly okay right so let's go back to um actually while i'm here i'm gonna go to the body and then i'm gonna move the shoulder and attach it to where it's supposed to be so you see where the a little green dot is so that's where our shoulder is so i'm going to put that there and then i'm going to do the left one too uh since we're here already so once we have that done uh let's head out back to record mode so our arm is much much more better it's no longer dislocated from the body and it's looking pretty good so let's go ahead and repeat the exact same steps for the left arm all right so when we go to the record mode now our left hand is also pretty good and looking good so far and if you want to adjust some of the parameters as to how the elbow moves or the stretchiness or you can do that right here where it says um ik so you see if i reduce the elbow strength or the elbow would move less so it will have less flexibility so it's kind of a stiff elbow and that's that and you could also move around the stretchiness for example if i increase it i can get this kind of fantastic four kind of effect where the arm stretches to pull things uh superhero arms yep so that's something you can do if that's the effect you're going for but our puppet is now fully completed so the only thing we need to just do now is uh start recording using our camera and i will just show you a little demo of that as you can see i have everything already amped and my camera and now the puppet is moving to my head my face and i can be like hello everybody welcome to this video hope you're all having a great time we're gonna be having a nice tutorial here today so definitely this a lot more you can also do like creating triggers and so that when you press maybe a button like the puppet switches positions and things like that we're definitely going to cover some of these in a another video but now you fully have a puppet that looks like you that you can control just using your face your eyes your mouth and and things like that and using your mouse also so go ahead and have fun with that all right but before we go here's a little extra tip for those who might want to do a little extra um in case you want to use my mouth set go down to the description and download that so once you have that downloaded you just want to double click to open it on photoshop so this is what it looks like it comes with a bunch of different uh lip shapes like a surprise shape a smile and then you have your eyes and the rest of the ooze just a more human like uh mouth shape and how to add that to your character you just simply want to click on the layer right here and ctrl c to copy it all right so what i'm going to do is now open my poppet and then expand the head group here and then i'm just going to delete the old mouth shapes that we had and then i'm going to do ctrl v to paste in this new mouth shape that i just downloaded so i'm gonna drag that back into the head and then you just do ctrl t to resize that all right that fits now and if you wanted to say change the color to match your skin tone again it's just the same thing that i've showed you so for example the natural shape i'll click on that i'll use the eye drop tool to click on my skin and then just use the paint bucket to to click in there and there you go you now have the lips in the shape of your skin tone you can do that for the rest of the mouth shape and that's as simple as that gets okay moving on to my second tip if you wanted to do different hand positions like pointing or thumbs up and things like that that's quite simple just open your body set and once you have that open you see that we did the the default hand position which is the the one that just stays neutral you can then see that you have a flip and point and you can have infinite amounts of these groups as much as you want so what i'm going to simply do is that i'm going to replace where we have flip i already have a flipped hand so i'm gonna copy that and just paste that in here and then align that so i now have a flipped hand so i'm gonna save this and let's move on to character animate to see the changes that we just did now okay so now i'm back to character animate as you can see our new mouth set has taken place and the lips have changed and then also if you look to the your triggers here you see that they've created a with a blank puppet a few triggers so for example if i press one it switches to that flip hand so if i did something like this so you see uh that's instead of the hand looking backwards the hand is now flipped properly i'm pledging my allegiance to something whatever that is and if i press three that also replaces the the other am right here and i'm robbing my stomach you know uh because i'm hungry and you can see a few triggers that i have here you could just change the artwork and that generates the triggers in later videos i'm going to show you how to create your own custom triggers all right there you go you now have your very own puppet which you can now control just using your head and your voice and your facial expressions if you want to learn more on how to do that check out my other video right here to the left where i explain fully how to do that and if you have any questions for me let me know down in the comments or you could follow me on instagram the link to that is in the description of this video send me a dm i'll try my best to answer those as time permits me if you like any of my content or like what you've seen so far don't forget to subscribe that way you get notified when i release new videos i'll be creating more videos on this topic and even more topics so see you in the next video thanks for stopping by bye

Channel: Emmanuel Crown

Views: 509,847

Keywords: Creating Animations, How to Animate Characters, Adobe Character Animate CC, introduction to Animations, photoshop tutorial, character animator, character animation, adobe character animator, adobe character animator cc, okay samurai, puppet animation, animation tutorial, character animator rigging, character animator triggers, character animator body tracker, character animator lip sync, character animator create puppet, character animation photoshop

Id: aLuJ-TKrMjI

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020