Computer animation just a laptop away

The next great animated character may well be created at home on a laptop by … you.

If you have always wanted to create your own computer animation, maybe a Rubbery Figures-style political satire or a cartoon starring yourself, now is the time.

Cartoon-making is coming to the masses, thanks to a range of software. Adobe has you in its sights with its new Character Animator, which has made its debut with the 2015 edition of its Creative Cloud suite.

“The ability to animate a character in real time with accurate body and facial movement and lip synch was previously reserved for high-end film companies with very ­expensive tracking equipment,” Adobe Australia-Pacific principal evangelist Paul Burnett tells Life. “Now anyone can simply create a character and quickly build a realistic synched animation on a laptop computer.”

You get a Beta version of Character Animator when you download Adobe After Effects, used for media post-production. When I tried out CC 2015 recently, Character Animator proved too tempting to ignore.

These days professional animation heavily involves capturing human movement and applying it to characters, and Adobe mimics that. You perform in front of a web camera and Character Animator gets a character to mimic your sounds, movements and gestures. As I found out, there’s still a lot of work in creating a homespun masterpiece, but it’s doable if you are skilled in Photoshop or Illustrator and have patience.

But easy animations are mainly limited to dialogue, and upper body movements that support it. You couldn’t produce a Rubbery Figures with the brilliance of a Peter Nicholson production of a quarter of a century ago. But you could animate some weird and entertaining characters and, in rasping tones, mimic an Abbott-Shorten confrontation.

There are plenty of online tutorials to help you create you own cartoon characters. If drawing isn’t your thing, there are mobile apps that can create good sketches from photos. I used the free iOS and ­Android app Sketch Master to create some characters from photos.

Adobe provides a blank template with a series of layers that you need to build in Photoshop or Illustrator. It has layer names such as “right eyeball”, “right pupil”, “right blink”, and various mouth shapes for speaking and for limb positions.

In Photoshop or Illustrator, you copy the relevant part of the character’s body to those layers with alternate representations for movements you want animated. To shorten the process, you can copy and then change existing characters to make new ones.

The next step is to import your characters into Character Animator and act out the sequences you want in front of your web camera. The program maps your speech, facial and body movements to the character and creates an animation that you can export as video.

My first animation used Adobe’s supplied characters. It’s hardly worth writing home about, but here it is.

If you think this is hard, consider what computer animation involved when in 1972, US PhD students Ed Catmull (now president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Fred Parke created one of the world’s first 3-D animated movies — that of a moving hand.

They first created plaster casts of the hand and drew 350 polygons and triangles on them. All co-ordinates of these shapes were typed by hand into a computer. That was just the start of an incredibly involved process.

Adobe’s idea of capturing human speech and movement isn’t new. Sydney animator Phil Willis, best known for his work on Happy Feet 2 with director George Miller’s Dr D Studios, says while motion capture had been around for years, it is more sophisticated.

“Any of the characters in Happy Feet 2 that had two arms, two legs and stood upright pretty much were done by actors on a motion capture stage,” he says. “We put little dots all over them in black ­suites and they’re trying their best to look like penguins and act like penguins. Then the animaters step in and make it more penguin like.”

Animating human movement has led to specialist roles for actors, such as Andy Serkis’s motion portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of The Rings films.

But not all studios capture motion in this way. Sydney’s Animal Logic, a world famous digital studio responsible for animation in masterpieces such as Babe and The Matrix and more recently with Iron Man 3 and Hunger Games: Catching Fire, has sought to create motion through building the anatomy of animals and creating motion consistent with their muscle tone. This technique was used in movies such as in Walking with ­Dinosaurs 3D.

“You set up the dinosaurs to move like they would be able to in the real world,” says Jim Dodd, animation lead at Animal Logic. “You build the models, then a detailed and accurate skeleton inside it, and then you dress that with appropriate muscles that would pull the skeleton around in the appropriate way. We build it from the ground up.”

Dodd says on a dinosaur’s face there can be 40 or 50 parameters that can be altered on the top layer, while underneath there can be hundreds more parameters. In 2000, you would be faking the way things were built to look as if they were moving realistically, but not now.

He says Animal Logic also achieved that level of realism with its depiction of owls in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. You could incorporate feather simulations about how they looked when wet and how they moved in relation to the wind.

In Wellington, New Zealand, Weta Digital studios, which won Academy awards for Avatar, The Lord of the Rings films and King Kong, is known for using human motion capture to create its crowd scenes.

Animations supervisor Dave Clayton says recent increases in the speed of computer hardware and software speed are helping animaters work a lot faster. Despite this, the craft of creating animation remains the same.

“The process of creating key-frames and creating movement with your character is kind of set but what changes is the technology we can use that enables us to get there faster,” he says.

“In the 15 years I’ve been animating, now I rarely need to render out my stuff to see if it works or not. I can just play it back in my theme file and it just plays along at 20, 30 or 40 frames per second.” Previously he had to wait up to five minutes before he could view an animation sequence he just created.

Adobe, meanwhile, is hoping its users will offer feedback on Character Animator. Could it be a natural ­replacement for Flash in animation?

Burnett says Adobe certainly plans to continue to develop Character Animator, to add the features wanted by users to make it more functional and fully featured.

We’ll see.

A cartoon by The Australian’s Bill Leak animated using Adobe Character Animator. Producer: James Tindale.

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