Rigging a Character in Reallusion Cartoon Animator Using One Oppa Doll Sprite

[Music] hi there viewers i'm the extraordinary tourist or sometimes i'm known as the lazy animator or david arundel and this video is going to be a bit of a behind the scenes video on a new animated short i'm working on featuring my mia and the tourist characters what i'm going to show you is a little bit of behind the scenes character creation for a new character that's going to appear in that animation so i won't spend too much time talking here we'll get straight into the actual creating of the character right so this is a still from the animation that i'm working on and you can see here this is my characters mia which is the girl just here and the tourist which is an avatar loosely based on myself and they have this replica sentient r2d2 droid that travels with them wherever they go and in this particular animation they're looking to hire a car but i won't go into any more detail than that all you need to know and as part of this animation there's going to be a new character which is the car rental guy which is this character here and i haven't actually rigged this character up in cartoon animator so that's the process i'm going to go through today now all of these characters are created in a mobile phone application called operdoll if you're wondering how i'm running up a dial on a windows computer this is bluestacks and open source android emulator for windows and i believe you can get it for possibly mac and linux as well but it lets you run android apps on your pc so that's how i'm doing that and this is the upper dial app and i will leave links in the description for this app if you want to try it out but just be careful downloading it because uh the latest version of this at the time of recording this when i downloaded it wouldn't actually work on bluestacks all i got was a black screen and music so i had to chase down an older version of it in order to get it running but i'll just quickly show you the app pretty straightforward it's an avatar creator you can see i've already created my character here ready to go and if you're using this to create characters for cartoon animator one thing you want to sort of watch for is when you make a character is look for ones that have arms like this where you can see the full arm rather than like this where the arm is behind the back when you're making characters but as you'll see i'll edit this character and go into the editor you see we can change his skin color hair eyes eyebrows mouth then when we get to the shirt you can see you don't get a lot of choice on where the arms are so if you can choose something that has an arm showing uh so if i was to do this t-shirt oh that didn't work because he's got chair on from this section take that off see the t-shirt there arms behind the back so you might have to take a screenshot of a version of the character where the arms are out generally these ones with the jackets tend to have more options for things in the arms that are out get rid of that shirt again anyway that's what it is and as you can see select all these things put lushes on the face if you want to add accessories and that kind of thing and once you're done you'll want to get out of the editor again okay go back to here and then you'll want to take a snapshot of it which you can do by selecting that button select the share thing if you want to save it to your desktop whatever i won't do that because i've already actually saved this character but that's how you save them out and we're gonna have to i'm gonna have to do some preparation here so that i've got this character in an a pose and i'll be using my one sprite method of rigging a character too so now that i've got this guy i'm gonna get out of here and we're gonna go into critter so i'll close that down got critter open here over there and in the corner here just so that you see what he looks like as i work what i'm going to do is bring that into critter zoom in a bit try and work as quickly as i can so what i want to do first is get this arm here so it's away from his side now i've got that in place i need to make it match on the other side i'm hopefully going to do simply by selecting that area and there we go flatten the image and that's now our character already be brought into cartoon animator i might just crop it down a bit quite as much background on him and i'll save that out save it as a png file even though i haven't made it transparent i'm going to leave it up to cartoon animator to do that so now we're going to open up cartoon animator all right so here we are in cartoon animator and the very first thing that you need to do rigging a character using my one sprite method is to find a g3 dummy character going to my g3 humans this character doesn't need anything like bone hands or whatever like that so i'm just going to stick with front view dummy character like this make it even easier go with a different dummy characters you see this one has actually got the limbs already done take me a bit of work to delete that i'm going to go with one that doesn't have the limbs already done so i'm going to replace that this is a dummy character with just a single image in the hip joint so we'll take that one into the character composer and you'll see here that if i open up the sprite and you'll see there's a sprite for the hip joint but if i go torso on the head and the arms everything is empty i'm going to do is replace the hip joint place the current sprite with my character i'll make him sort of roughly the size and obviously the next thing we want to do is get rid of the background on that you can see the hip bones now being replaced with our sprite and we want to open up the masking tool that character and do the mask editor and see with one click we've just nicely made all that region transparent we have to change any settings whatsoever to do that and the next thing we want to do move all those bones but before i do that i'm going to save the character on the off chance you don't fall victim to the program crashing right here my other characters manage it and the next thing we want to do is start adjusting all the bones all right so if you hold the e key while you're moving things hold down the e key on your keyboard and see i can move that bone around without affecting everything around it and i don't need to do this too accurately because this character isn't going to be doing a whole lot of moving in the animation he's mostly going to be standing there and talking all right so we can before we do that we'll show the wireframe and you can see that that's fairly wide we want to sort of make that a bit more dense there we go we preview that that's probably going to be good enough for my needs in terms of what he's going to do i think i might want to put his arms separate so that i don't get this weird sort of stretching preview and save what we've done so far now so if i want to make add arms without doing too much extra work what we have to do is select an arm i think we can add stuff through the layer manager so we've got the arm selected you see it's open in the layer manager this button and do add image and you'll see this box comes up that says keep parent transform and what that does is when i import this particular image it'll apply the same transform that i applied to this main image here so and we'll go get our full sprite image again and you'll see now that the hip layer and the right arm layer this right arm layer here is now theory the sprite for my right arm you can see here so what i need to do now is simply cut out everything from the image that is not the right arm so we go into the mask editor and this is remember this is for the right arm so the first thing we want to do is get make it transparent like the original image we want to keep just this we don't want the rest of it i'm going to use the paint brush tool nice and big don't want any blur around the edges and we're just going to paint all this out we're going to keep a little bit of edge around the top of the right arm and you'll see why late in just a moment get rid of all this that i'm going to do drop that and then i'm going to go to the eraser and adjust the size of my brush i get a nice circle end on here that fits nicely in the end of that i'm just gonna click once give me that nice circle there and i'll just move this edge out here so it's more of a straight line that'll do so we'll get out of this and you'll see now if i preview this and move that arm i've now got this arm that i've just made but you can also see i've still got my original arm which i don't want so now i have to go back into the hip right and do the mask tool and this is now the hip sprite as you can see everything is there including the arm and i just need to erase the arm out of this mask and you'll see now when i go back in my image and i preview this you'll see now i've got a much better looking arm working here i could do a little bit more in here to smooth that out we'll go back into this is the left arm and into the layer manager make sure that's selected and do add image keep the parent transform and again get the exact same image we just used open see that's brought the left arm layer into here and just go through the same process selecting the left arm and removing everything from this he's not part of the left arm that'll do and just check what that looks like now we've got two arms we're going to get rid of the arm from the hip again so we just want to do exactly what we've done there check out how the wireframe's looking for everything all right so everything's looking good now have character with separated arms all right so the last thing i want to do is a morph based head so what we're going to do to do that is going to create head create morph based head and we don't need to save the face file do you want to replace the current head and then we're just going to get the exact same image we used for the body and go through the process of creating a head obviously you don't need to be too accurate with these when you first start and because this is a symmetrical character i'm going to click this button here so i can mirror everything all right so that's the basic points now we'll do the more detailed point mirror on for the minute stage and there you go there we have the head we need to do a few things to it we'll line up with the current head out there and the next thing we need to do work on the mask won't be exactly the same shape as the original head because it will have some distortion because of the type of head it is and the next thing we'll have to do go to the hip and remove the current head and again we're going to make a neck regular neck area here preview this now hopefully see there's no head behind there i have to adjust where that neck point is up down left right and some natural movement eyes closing and blinking up down left right and rolling a e i see we've got a bit of work on the face to do you have to do a bit of erasing hopefully that's got it and next we're just going to put some eyes into his head so we're going to go into morph eyes cartoon and i want to go cormic because he's basically got these black eyes and then i'm going to do a morph mount i'm going to do a cartoon mouth as well and just do this basic mouth here okay and i'm going to do some adjustment on the eyes we don't want him to have makeup turn that off he doesn't need to have an eyelash eyeball iris going to scale that up place 15 units huh leave it with that now just have a quick look at the mouth much i want to do with that a little less shadow and width a bit probably do quick preview of his face celebration up down left right and some natural movement eyes closing and blinking up down left right and rolling a e angry sad surprised and scared i'll just save that now and obviously there's a few tweaks i could do to that but i'll leave it there for now that's pretty much my one sprite method of rigging a character so there you go that's a bit of behind the scenes of rigging a character for my upcoming animated short with mia and the tourist i hope you found that interesting and got something out of seeing how i rigged my characters using my one sprite method today till the next video i shall see you later bye now foreign

Channel: Animation and Video Life

Views: 8,244

Keywords: art, artist, animator, animation, cartoon, etourist, tet, tetanimations, Cartoon Animator, Reallusion

Id: p8gykFgsLMY

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022