how to make an animated cartoon of yourself using your webcam | Characterizer

what's up everybody and welcome to another tutorial in today's tutorial i'm gonna be showing you how you can take the little webcam on your computer and adobe character animator to convert yourself into an animated character which you can control with your eyes your lips your mouth and even your words just like the one you're seeing right now and many other styles like this other one that you're seeing right here all within character animator and in less than five minutes even if you had no animation skills or you don't even know how to draw and i'm going to show you how to do all of this in this tutorial now this is part two in my series of how to convert yourself into an animated cartoon in the first part i showed you how you could take a picture of yourself and convert that into a puppet using character animator now this gave you the foundation of how puppets are made and you can always tweak that and fix any issues with your puppet if you want to today we're going to be doing things a lot more simpler we're going to be using an inbuilt tool called characterizer now this aims to automate that process of converting yourself into a puppet it doesn't work as good as the first part that we did but you can still get some very decent results using this method and i'm going to show you how that works in a minute if you don't have character animator installed i'm going to put a link down in the description to a seven days trial you can download that to follow along this tutorial and if you've never used the software before i have a seven minutes video that gives you a quick overview of how the software works i'm gonna put that also in the description so you can check that out to see how the software works now without wasting any time let's get straight to the tutorial [Music] to open the characterizer tool simply go to files and then click on open characterizer this will open the tool and then you have several options you can click right below here and more to import an image that you have on your computer to import but i advise to just use the new capture and start the process from scratch so i'll click on new capture now this will lead you to the process of capturing your facial features so some tips that i have for you here is that make sure that your background is not cluttered because the computer is going to be trying to separate your face from the background so it helps that if your background is not cluttered it helps it work better and then also just make sure that your face is properly lit so that the computer can tell the difference between your eyes and some of your facial features so once you're done with that and you're ready just make sure you align your head uh to the little oval shape right here and have your nose sort of in the middle of the line and once you're ready just click on start capture and the process will start so i'm gonna let that play out so you see what that process is like look at the camera lens and make a neutral expression in three two one close your eyes in three two one open your eyes and smile in three two one frown in three two one make a surprised expression in three two one repeat after me adobe adobe photoshop photoshop lightroom lightroom woohoo woohoo so once that is done it's going to capture several pictures as you can see it's taking different uh pictures of your different expressions of your face natural smiling and all of that in addition to that it's also captured the different mouth shape that you make when you pronounce certain letters that's why it was asking you to pronounce some of those words right there in the beginning and this is going to be used for the lip syncing whenever you're using the lip sync functions so once you're done with that you just click on finish and this is going to generate your puppet all right if everything worked well you should now have this photo of your head which has been automatically carved out by the ai and if you click right here to the right you should be able to scroll through the different facial expressions that it captured and also the different mouthpiece so you can go through this to just make sure that everything looks right the way you want it to be so if that looks good the very next thing you want to do is to apply a style to your picture so it looks more like a cartoon and to do that simply just click on one of the styles that we have at the bottom here for example if i click this drawing style here as you can see my picture becomes a little bit cartoonized now that doesn't look very much like me but i'm going to show you how to fix that in a second if i go ahead and choose maybe like more of this charcoal style you can see the picture also changes to that charcoal style and there are numerous styles here and i'm also going to show you how to even change and create a custom style in a second so i'm going to go ahead and select a style here and tweak the parameters to look just right so i can show you what this looks like and then we're going to come back to go over what each of these parameters do as you can see i now have a puppet which has been created for me which i can control just using my head so if i move my head the puppet moves if i blink my eyes the puppets also blink if i move my eyebrows that also moves and just using my mic also when i speak the lip sync happens and the puppet mouth moves which is pretty pretty cool and quite easy to do if you enjoyed this tutorial so far do me a favor and hit that thumbs up button this helps me to grow the channel and if you're not yet subscribed i want to see more like this make sure you hit that subscribe button now let's continue with the tutorial all right so far so good next i'm going to walk you through each of the settings that we have right here and what they do to your image so the very first option we're going to go through is the stylization and that determines how much of the style you want to add to your image for example if i take this slider and drag it all the way to the end it's going to add a lot more of the style and it looks more like the style and less like me if i want it to look more like me and preserve my facial features i'm gonna drag and reduce the style and as you can see it now looks a lot more like me and preserves some of my feature features so the goal is just to play around with this value until it looks uh what the way you want it to be so the next option you have right here is what is called the feature exaggeration and this is used to exaggerate some features of your face if you want to change the way your face look for example if i drag this all the way i have this sort of like a caricature head look and then if i drag this all the way to the bottom as you can see my face is a little bit fat so if you just kind of wanted to alter a little bit of how your face looks you can do this to give your face a different type of style all right next let's go through the circles option so this sort of goes frame by frame and add an animated sequence to your puppet to sort of bring it to life so it has this sort of a live illustrated look for example if i choose four circles it's gonna go frame by frame as you can see it's adding some animation that stays constantly on the puppet itself so the next two options go hand in hand the resolution just changes the size of the puppet that you get an overall bigger size which gives you a better quality and then the quality option just chooses how much fidelity you want to have in the pocket so if you choose a higher quality you're going to see more of the textures from the style that you apply and it's going to look overall good and a creepsier looking poppet but as it says it's slower so you need a much powerful computer if you're trying to do something with a higher quality but overall i always choose the higher quality because i just feel like the details in the image sells the effect more the next option head only takes away the rest of the face and the head and gives you just the head of the puppet so you wanted to take this and put it in another body that you've generated or use just the face for something you can check the head on the option and that will take away the rest of the background and the body of your pocket so the final option you have here is head turns if you check this on what character animator is going to do is it's automatically going to try to generate the side profiles of the face so that when somebody's doing uh capture using the webcam if they turn their head the puppet also turns and you can see a side profile of the face like what you're seeing right now on the screen uh it pretty does a good job at that and that gives your character uh or puppet more life so i would advise to turn on this feature depending on what kind of style of animation you're trying to do so once you're done with your puppet you have two options you can either right click on this blue generate button right here and export this as a single frame so this should just export whatever image you're seeing here and you can use this as a profile picture or whatever you want to do with the picture the next option is to click on generate and this will now create a live puppet which you can now animate with your face and your voice which is what we're gonna do in this video alright so this was how i generated the puppet which i demoed earlier so let's go ahead and make this look a little bit more interesting the first thing i want to do is resize my canvas so just click right here on the empty area and that opens up the canvas and then you go right here to the top right corner i'll change this to 1920 by 1080. so the next thing we're going to do is add a background to this whole set so that it looks a little bit more interesting of course there are many places you can get background form but if you're trying to look for royalty free ones that you pay for um my go to source for that is envato element because they have not only backgrounds but they also have sound effect libraries they're after effect templates they even have photoshop plugins like these that you can use to cartoon yourself as well as cartoon assets for videos and things like that so that's where i go uh whenever i want to get uh paid access so i'll put a link to that you can check that out and see if that works for you but you can also check google and some other sites to get whatever background to put to make things look nice so i'm just gonna drag the background and drop it into the timeline and again if you need an overview of how all of this works check out my quick intro into this software that's gonna show up at the end screen after this video so i have the background right here next if i just go to the right i'll just change the x and y position of the poppet to make sure it matches within the picture frame and because the background i'm using has some transparency around the picture frame i'm just going to come right here and drag my puppet to the lower layer so that it fits properly within the frame and looks more realistic and now all i need to do is just hit the record button and i can start creating something cool hey there look at me i'm an art masterpiece how cool is that and when you play that back hey there look at me i'm an art masterpiece how cool is that alright i'm sure that has been exciting so far finally we're going to talk about creating your own custom style so let's say you don't want to use any of the styles that they have here and you want to create something custom so that's quite simple to do all you have to do is find an image of the painting you want to use the drawing all the sculpture you can check for that online like on google you just need to make sure that you have the right licensing for that if you're going to be using this for commercial purposes but since i just want to demonstrate you how that works i'm just going to go right here on google and search for an oil painting and i can see this painting here by uh charles hanford from adc.net we're just going to use this for demonstration poppers only so i'm going to download and save this image on my computer and i'm going to show you how we can convert this into a style so once you have your image downloaded what you want to do is go right here and click on new style and then select the image so this is going to open the puppet generator and it's going to do its best to try to map out the facial features from the image that you just uploaded but in case it doesn't do a good job just click right here on the magnifying glass you can use this to expand and zoom in and then if you switch to the vector tool you can click on each of this point and adjust it to fit properly with the way that the facial features of the image that you just uploaded are set just to make sure you get everything right so once you're done with this simply just head over to the top and click on next so the next thing it's going to ask you to do is paint out where you have your face your hair some of the clothes and the background now it's going to do a good job to try to automatically pick this but sometimes it's missed some of this like right here i can see where it has the green there it's still some face there so i'm just gonna click on the brush tool and you can change the size of the brush tool right here to the right at the bottom so just make that smaller and then i'm gonna go right here to the face and begin to paint out the part of the face that it missed uh just to make sure it captures all of the face from the picture so you're gonna have to repeat the same steps for the hair the neck the clothing and the background and then once you're done just click on done right here at the top and that's all there is to it you now have your own very custom style that you can apply to your puppet and give it whatever look that you're trying to create so one thing to note about the puppets is that they're actually editable photoshop files so if there's something about the puppet that was generated that you don't actually like if you know how to use photoshop you can actually edit this and they're they're in each layers and you can edit some of that like in my case the background right here looks a little bit mushed up so i'm just going to right click on the puppet file right here and click on edit original so as you can see right here if i open up the puppet group i have access to each and every layer that was generated and i can make whatever edits it is that i want to make to this in my case i simply just want to turn off the background so i'm just going to go ahead and turn that off and save it if i head back to character animator you can see now that i have my puppet without the background and i can go ahead and import this custom frame which i've already made to make it look nicer and then like that you see my pop it now looks great and i can use this to create whatever video content i want to create all right that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed that tutorial as you can see this was much easier than the previous tutorial this is a very very easy way that you can piece puppets together that look like you and you can start creating engaging content within minutes once again if you enjoyed this tutorial i do ask that you help me by hitting that thumbs up button and do subscribe to the channel if you want to see more tutorials like this one thank you for stopping by i'm going to catch you in the next one keep learning bye [Music] you

Channel: Emmanuel Crown

Views: 24,414

Keywords: Creating Animations, How to Animate Characters, Adobe Character Animate CC, introduction to Animations, photoshop tutorial, how to, how to make a cartoon, character animation, how to make a cartoon of yourself, cartoon yourself, creating animations, character animator, adobe character animate cc, introduction to animations, adobe character animator, character animation tutorial, characterizer character animator, webcam, How to Create custom characterize styles

Id: bcE3PPDpxgY

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022