CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 Graphic Design and Animation Photoshop Pipeline SYNAPSE CIRCUIT NEWS

SYNAPSE CIRCUIT 

NEW CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 Graphic Design and Animation Photoshop Pipeline

NEWS!

#Reallusion #CrazyTalk3point2 #Design #Animation #Photoshop #PSD #AffinityPhoto #AffinityPhoto #Xara

It never ceases to amaze me how Reallusion keeps reaching for new heights! Here's the latest...

21st September 2017, San Jose, CA - CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 update provides a total Photoshop PSD in-and-out solution to not only help 2D Animators, but also Graphic Designers. Save lots of time on character creation and animated content development thanks to a round-trip PSD pipeline that can bring artwork to life through source animation file editing with Photoshop’s powerful editing features.

CrazyTalk Animator & Photoshop Video: http://y2u.be/Ui493bHbOHE

Watch!

Turn Artwork into Animations, & Vice Versa

With the CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 Pipeline, artists can convert 2D artworks to animatable characters through PSD Templates. Now it also allows Graphic Designers everywhere to quickly repurpose their content with new styles, colors, accessories, and poses. The new CTA 3.2 PSD export capabilities allow you to freely pose illustrated characters, quickly swap outfits & accessories, and create custom facial expressions prior to composing everything back in PSD design layers. All source sprites are exported for compositing and re-editing, allowing artists to save lots of time and effort when using PSD assets to generate comic creations, magazine covers, infographics, banner designs, and much more. Quickly Create Animated Content

With the capability to launch Photoshop and synchronize updates on character layers, CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 can send props or characters to Photoshop for further custom editing. With this ability users can easily design clothes, alter color shading, or apply filter effects to their animatable assets.

Sending content to Photoshop with logically grouped character assets makes it easy to change skin color, add multiple image segment layers, and synchronously update animatable sprites once you save the file in PSD format. Users can quickly upgrade simple illustrations to sophisticated visuals like paper cutting, hash shading, or add highlights and shading effects to individual body parts.

Animated Accessory System Users can freely compose one or several accessories by using several prop items together and assigning pre-made animations which can later be triggered through the Right-click menu. The updated Accessory System also allows you to apply a chosen item directly to a target body part. Generate a Whole Series of Characters Once you setup one character, then you can quickly add new assets in Photoshop to generate abundant styles. These assets can be reused, as characters are free to pose and animate. User Showcases - Comic Artists
"We are Veggie Studio and we are founded by three sisters that specialize in illustrations, comics, and dress up games. We really like CrazyTalk Animator 3, as it is so easy to create character animations. It is great for general animations, game scenes, game characters and presentation videos." - Veggie Studio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIqA94Smekc

User Showcases - Digital Illustrator

"My name is Kimberly Larmond, a graphic designer and illustrator based in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. I have been mulling around the idea of creating animated shorts for quite some time now. However, I have been a bit reluctant to undertake this task in After Effects, as it seems monumental. I stumbled across CrazyTalk Animator 3, and I was flabbergasted!"
 - Kimberly Larmond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJcvhr1tnfM

Compatible Character Animation for PSD Software
Whether you are a Photoshop guru or prefer to use another PSD compatible character design tool, CrazyTalk Animator 3.1 fully supports PSD import with: Photoshop, Xara, Affinity Photo, Clip Studio Paint and Krita.

More info on  CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 Importing & Exporting PSD
https://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk-animator/PSD-character-animation.html

Discover all the CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 Learning Resources 

Forum Help - https://forum.reallusion.com/Topic339721.aspx?Update=1
PSD Import -  https://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk-animator/import-PSD-file.html
PSD Export -  https://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk-animator/export-PSD-file.html

CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 is available for Mac or WIN PC, at Reallusion.com & the Apple Store - For more info on purchasing CrazyTalk Animator - CTA 3.1 Pipeline Version required for PSD support https://www.reallusion.com/store/product.html?p=cta 

Try CrazyTalk Animator 3.2 - Free Download - Pipeline Version https://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk-animator/download.html 

Free Animation Video Tutorials
New tutorials on importing Photoshop PSD to CrazyTalk Animator 3.2
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNV5zSFadPdnfZpP0ZDPjNOgOmEQmOmPJ 

About Reallusion: ​Reallusion Inc. is a 2D and 3D animation software and content developer. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, with R&D centers in Taiwan, and offices and training centers in Germany and Japan. Reallusion specializes in the development of real­time 2D and 3D cinematic animation tools for consumers, students and professionals. The company provides users with easy to use avatar animation, facial morphing and voice lip­sync solutions for real-­time 3D filmmaking, and previsualization for professional post ­production. Reallusion's core technologies are widely used by trainers, educators, gamers and filmmakers providing them with stand­alone movie studio packages. http://www.reallusion.com

Thank you for reading! Review coming soon... Synapse Circuit / Blue Gene

SERIF, TO AFFINITY AND BEYOND SYNAPSE CIRCUIT

SYNAPSE CIRCUIT 

SERIF

AFFINITY 

Goodhour, Synapse Circuit Readers! 

TO AFFINITY AND BEYOND 

#Serif #Affinity #AffinityDesigner #AffinityPhoto #AffinityPublisher

A MASTERSTROKE

London, UK, January 18, 2017, It took ages for my Serif Affinity Designer Workbook to arrive and when it did I was very, very impressed! As a Graphic & Multimedia Designer by trade, I've felt a little guilt that I didn't master Adobe Illustrator, so when Serif announced the release of the Affinity Designer application I promised myself that I would give Digital Illustration a good go!

I had used the brilliant DrawPlus for simple logo creation, and I mean simple! Affinity Designer meant a new start with a new software concept. In a masterstroke move, Serif initially released Affinity Designer for the MAC to critical acclaim. Still, to this day, the MAC computing platform maintains its reputation in amongst the Graphic Design Industry and it was vital for Serif to garner a long overdue recognition for its professional alternatives to some Adobe software applications: PagePlus - we'll come to that in a bit; DrawPlus, and PhotoPlus. As a result, Serif has reinvented itself as Affinity! As stated earlier, the first Affinity product was Designer. Unlike Adobe Illustrator one was able to purchase it outright without breaking the bank; Affinity Designer retails at an amazing £39.99! £39.99, not monthly or annually. No. A one time only fee! Awesome! When Affinity Designer came out last year on the PC I bought it straight away - especially as it was sold for an introductory discounted price of £29.99!

And, just before Xmas, Serif released Affinity Photo for the PC at a discounted price also! I had to get Affinity Photo too!


Above: Affinity Photo

GREATNESS
MAC users have been saying that Affinity Photo & Designer are PhotoShop and Illustrator killers, while this may be true for MAC users, the truth is that PhotoPlus and DrawPlus on the PC had slain PhotoShop & Illustrator many years ago! I have been using PhotoPlus and DrawPlus instead of the Adobe equivalents for the last 3 or so years! Adobe tried to make a comeback with PhotoShop Elements but Serif's PhotoPlus was more advanced in that it could output documents in the professional CMYK format. This has always been Serif's legacy - professional output. I have brought documents created with Serif products to print bureaus and always had great results!
Above: Affinity Illustrator

Serif is currently working on Affinity Publisher and a beta should be released soon. Now about Affinity Publisher...

PagePlus was, and still is, a great desktop publishing application but it was always lacking in the Digital Publishing steaks. For example, the video and audio players within a PagePlus produced PDF document looked terrible. Trying to do something that matches Adobe or Quark in Digital Publishing was an exercise in futility, sad to state. Before Adobe Flash got shot down in flames one could export InDesign documents as an interactive Flash medium.

It could very well be that Affinity Publisher will address Digital Publishing; the possibilities are vast! I envisage that Affinity Publisher could create executable HTML5 documents in the way in which a PowerPoint presentation could be launched from its native executable file; HTML5 is cross-platform compatible and therefore should present no problems in creating executables for MAC, iOS, Windows, and Android to name a few.

Can you imagine HTML5 documents that includes aspects like animations, page transitions, audio and video and much more besides? I can! Whether Serif delivers on it remains to be seen.

I am also hoping for PDF documents that include a great looking media player. The PDF slide player could be overhauled too! I don't know how hard it'll be for Serif to take PDF to higher heights as PDF is an Adobe technology. Would it be worth Serif's while to develop PDF? Would it be a good idea for Serif to create yet another media format? Other software houses have tried to create a media format only to crash and burn. Does anyone remember Scala? Scala was a dream turned into a nightmare. I bought one of its applications many, many moons ago... It was a multimedia product, like PowerPoint on steroids but there were so many bugs in it that it was never used. It had some great ideas for all its faults, though! It was a precursor to YouTube with Scala channels. These days, Scala is about kiosk displays. Ah, it was MM200 and it was a huge disappointment. Never mind...

Now that Serif Affinity is hot news it has a shot at creating a proprietary medium that can span different screens and operating system platforms. Serif Affinity has come back for the future and could be the creator of a medium that Flash so very much wanted to be when Steve Jobs shut it down.

WEBBED 
Sticking with Affinity Publisher, I had it in mind that Serif would incorporate the ability to output to web pages into it. The word is that Affinity Publisher will not have any web publishing attributes whatsoever! What??? That's crazy, right? This makes me wonder... It also looks like there will be no Affinity Web Designer either! If this is true then it is incredibly sad! Serif produced on of the best WYSIWYG applications ever in WebPlus! It would be a great shame if WebPlus and PagePlus couldn't merge into Affinity Publisher. That stated, Serif is enjoying a monumental high in its achievements that could encourage them to do something very, very special for Web Design, Digital Publishing, and traditional Paper Publishing!

2017, is going to a very exciting year for both Serif and its consumers. One other thing that I would like to ask of Serif for Affinity Publisher is the ability to create TrueType Fonts! There has to be a font designer onboard! I have always wanted to design fonts and it remains on my 'To Do' list!

In any event, WebPlus version X9 has been taken off the virtual shelf. You can't purchase it anymore! That is so, so very sad...

If my hunch is right then I think Affinity Publisher will have an option for web page design. Fingers crossed!

MOVIES
Serif has a legacy application for the editing and making of videos... Yes, you've guessed it, MoviePlus. And it looks like there will not be an Affinity version for the foreseeable future. This is a great shame!

For now, it looks like Serif is just concentrating on professional photo editing/manipulation and graphic design applications. Just imagine how brilliant a video editor could be? Imagine Affinity Movies that is what Affinity Photo is to videos... WOW!

UNDERSTANDABLE
I can understand where Serif is coming from in that the focus is revolutionary based professional photo and illustration applications but I can see that there is already a demand for an Affinity Web Design & Video Editing applications. I would imagine that the runaway successes, Affinity Photo, and Designer could mean that the web and video solutions are in development already! Who knows?

If I know Serif like I think I do, they'd want to have the equivalent for just about everything Adobe does. I think they will do it too - eventually!

Thank you for reading!

The Synapse Circuit website is in the making...

Best wishes,

Synapse Circuit aka Blue Gene