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Crazy Talk Animator Pro is a brilliant new animation program by the makers of iClone 4. With this great piece of software you can create, film and direct complete 2D cartoons and take your animation to the next level.
While you may be familiar with similar 2D animation software, such as Anime Studio Pro and Toon Boom, which have been around for some time, Crazy Talk Animator Pro offers an innovative approach, which greatly simplifies the traditionally tedious and complex animation processes.
Crazy Talk Animator Pro combines voice lip-sync and automated facial morphing solutions for talking head animations from previous versions with a complete 2D animation environment which includes the ability to create full body animations.
On top of that it offers a stage where you can drag and drop props and scenery to create complex sets and arrange them in Z space for a greater 3D feel. You can also drag, drop and resize various video clips and incorporate them into your scenery. Some of the other great features of Crazy Talk Animator Pro are the full real-time face and body puppeteering, the automatic face & body motion templates, advanced timeline & key frame editing and a vast content library.
Character creation in Crazy Talk Animator – Crazy Talk Animator allows you to make two kinds of characters: sprite-based and morph-based. Sprite-based characters are created out of vector artwork and use different animations (or sprites) to create movements and actions.
Morph-based characters are made up of photos or other scanned or raster images. In this case the movement comes from distorting or morphing their pixels to create various expressions such as anger, happiness, or movement of the limbs. The Crazy Talk Animator’s facial morphing system works great and it is great fun to watch the lifeless still photographs come to life.
With the help of an ingenious wizard you can set up the bones that make up the skeletal rig of the character by simply dragging around different points. Your character can then be animated by using a pre-defined motion clip, or you can do it manually, if you prefer to have more control.
Animating – Once you have created your character, you can start animating and bringing him to life. Most of the animating is done in real-time, or you can choose different preinstalled animations for head and body such as walking, jumping, dancing and various hand gestures. Even if you do not have any prior experience with animation, you can start making your own crazy animations in no time.
Lip-syncing can be a tedious chore, but this is not the case with CrazyTalk Animator. Here it is as simple as importing or recording a sound file and the different mouth positions (or phenomes) will automatically be lipsynced by your character. Another cool function is called text-to speech, which means that whatever you type in gets spoken by various TTS voices, which can be added by buying third-party software.
Other features of Crazy Talk Animator include the ability to combine different components such as clothing styles onto your character via the character composer, a library of special effects clips and emoticons and a thorough asset manager that allows you to keep track and apply the characters, scenes and props that you use in your animation by drag and drop.
Advanced timeline options allow you to move, copy, paste, extend, loop and group motion clips together, while the advanced key frame editing provides the options to control the opacity, transform, visibility, link, path animation, sprite switching and flipping with blending effects.
Once you’re finished with your animation you can export it to a movie file, upload it to the internet and share it with the rest of the world. CrazyTalk Animator supports various movie formats, such as AVI, MPEG-4, RM, WMV, NTSC or PAL, image sizes up to 3000×3000 and eye-popping stereoscopic ‘3D Stereo Vision’.
Crazy Talk Animator is very simple to use, but at the same time it is a powerful tool for making your own animations, cartoons, mash-ups and web or television series.
After reviewing this program I can say that it is perfect for beginners as well as professionals. Highly recommended! Now, enough talk already. Let’s animate!
Have fun…
