I recently had the occasion to experiment a little bit with Adobe Character
Animator, and I must say I was pretty impressed with it.
Basically, it allows you to animate a character -a simple .psd or .ai file- with really accurate face
and eye tracking. All you need to do is just sit in front of a camera (generally the computer’s webcam),
and it will track your face, detect blink, expressions, and even speech. You will also be able to apply
a lot of really well done physics effects and animations to your character.
In this video, you can see how I applied my head movement to the head of a rabbit. You can also see that the rabbit’s ears have a dangle, and this is also one of many the physics effects you can add to your character. This video was made at my work, and the rabbit was drawn by Swiss illustrator Andrea Peter.
What is really interesting with this software, is that, apart from animating humanoid characters really quickly and realistically, you can apply this process to more abstract things, such as animals or even inanimate objects (trees, leaves, balloons, and everything else you’d want to give a natural movement).
Some people are already doing interesting experiments with Character Animator: this guy has done live projection on a Halloween pumpkin, and I must say it’s awesome.
There is really good support for learning this software. One of the developers of Character Animator has
done a complete series of tutorials on YouTube that walks you through the software.
Can’t wait to experiment more!