This is the third of a series of articles over the next 12 weeks that will cover my research and learning about the 2D animation program Cartoon Animator 5 created by Reallusion. I will share my learning journey including any problems or issues that occur. My end goal is to help you understand what you can do with Cartoon Animator 5 and perhaps try it out yourself. You can read the first week's article here. 

A Quick Animated Scene

Reallusion tutorials are always helpful, but sometimes the best way to learn a program is to become task oriented. You learn the steps required to create something you’ve imagined. That way it stays in your memory. Eventually, you build up a lot of steps and you start to have a good understanding of the program helps you to create things you’ve imagined.

With this in mind, let’s create a short film by choosing a character, then adding animation and a prop. Then we select a scene to place our character in. And finally, we add a second character who listens. The last step is to render the project into a short video.

• Step 1 Add an Actor

The Content Manager on the right is divided up into sections. We want the Actors section on the right of the program interface. Then click human / G3 360 human.  Scroll down a bit and select the character Red-S (notice that you can choose several versions of the character, f is for front facing, s is for side facing) and then drop and drag her onto the central area which is where we will construct our scene. CTA 5 also allows you to search for the content in the box above the content area.

• Step 2 Add Animation

We want a short animation for our Red_S character, so go to the Animation tab and choose 2D motion/Human/Female/Side. We want the Idle-Stand animation. Again, drop and drag to apply. You can also simply double-click. and the animation will immediately be added to your actor. 

Note that the animations I'm working with come from the free download pack that you get when you download CTA 5 (along with actors, sets, etc).

• Step 3 Add a prop and connect it to the actor

You can see in the animation we’ve chosen that the actor, Red_S idles a bit, puts her hand on her hip, and then looks at a cell phone briefly. Let’s add a cell phone prop. Go to the Props tab and at the top of the content area, you’ll find a search box. Type “cell” and a few cell phone models will come up. We want the "back-facing cell phone".

Reallusion gives you a number of free props when you download the program. When you select any kind of prop make sure you choose the right one. In this case, when the actor looks at the cell phone, we will see the back of it. That's why we've chosen the "back-facing" version of the cell phone prop.

Now, here’s where it  gets just a little more complex, but it's not too bad. What we want to do is attach the cell to the actor's right hand. To do this we need to be in the COMPOSER mode. CTA 5 defaults to the SCENE mode which is where you start creating your scene. The COMPOSER mode allows you to work specifically with the different elements of the scene, like our cell phone prop

You can switch to the COMPOSER mode by selecting your actor first, then for a small icon of a person with a small c next to them. This is in the top left-hand corner of the screen. When your mouse hovers over the icon it says "COMPOSER". Click the icon and you'll see large letters at the bottom left-hand corner indicating you are in the "COMPOSER" mode.  

What we want to do now is attach the cell prop to the actor's left hand. You will notice that when you went into COMPOSER mode the bones of your actor now appear in bright yellow. Locate the left-hand bone. 

Lastly, select the cell phone and drop it onto the left-hand bone. We are done. By the way, you can also select the hand bone and then just double-click the prop and it will be added/attached to the hand