More About Rigging My First Vector Character in Cartoon Animator 5 For My Resident Dragon, 2D Animated Web Series

Cartoon Animator 5’s Smooth Mode Face Setup.

It’s taken some doing but I’ve finally finished rigging the front facing angle of my G3-360 Vector TET Avatar character for my 2D animated web series Resident Dragon. If you’re new to this series I’ve been showing the behind the scenes development of the character for my animation software, Cartoon Animator 5 because it is a particularly advanced rig with challenges that I haven’t seen solved anywhere else.

If you would like to catch up here’s links to Part 1 and Part 2 which cover the very beginnings of the character and series, and both include behind the scenes video as well.

This post was a final push to get the character finished and animated. I should point out, it doesn’t normally take this long to rig a vector character for Cartoon Animator. I’ve just had limited time and have been developing solutions for common challenges people have faced when rigging a character with outlines, so the outlines don’t break.

Face Motion Capture

Using Cartoon Animator’s Motion Live Plugin to demonstrate the benefits of rigging sprite faces using Smooth Mode instead of Sprite Mode.

Before we get into the behind the scenes details I wanted to highlight how well Cartoon Animator’s Smooth Mode Facing rigging animates with motion capture, specifically the notoriously bad webcam motion capture profile for the Motion Live Plugin.

I was so impressed at how well the live lip syncing worked I featured this demo right at the beginning of my video (embeded at the bottom of this article).

In the Layer Panel you can see all my bone joint names for the left hand are prefixed with an ‘L’ that isn’t part of the bones name in the hand bones shown at the bottom of the layer list. (click image to enlarge)

Bone Hand Joints

In my previous post I was struggling to work out how to add my circle joints into the fingers of the character’s bone hands. I knew you could add additional joints to the hand because you can using Cartoon Animator’s Bone Editor, I just didn’t know how to add them to the template so I wouldn’t have to add the joints in Cartoon Animator.

It turns out, for bone hands, once the template rig is imported into Cartoon Animator, an ‘L’ or ‘R’ (Left or Right) is added to the bone hand’s bone names. Something I discovered by exporting a PSD character with bone hands since I don’t have the software to export a vector character (only Adobe Illustrator will accept full vector character exports).

This was why I couldn’t link my joint bones to the finger bones – I didn’t know about the name change. However, once I worked this out, the finger joints work like a charm. You can almost forget they’re part of the rig and they just work to keep the finger sprite outlines unbroken.

With proper planning, SVG Color Management can be used to change the appearance of characters and even remove clothing such as a jacket.

Color Management

If you’re not taking advantage of Color Management with Cartoon Animator’s vector characters you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful addition. Properly planned for you can turn one character rig into many character variations that don’t even look like the same character.

For this character I had two goals for color management. The first was to be able to change all the colors easily e.g. change the character’s jacket color, outline colors etc. The second was to use color management to remove the jacket altogether so the character was just wearing their business shirt and tie.

I’m not going into how I did all this since color management is fairly well documented in Reallusion’s own training materials. How well it works comes down to how you plan the character’s design, and how you divide the various elements.

My SVG template in Affinity showing my added Spring bones (red crosses in the hair).

Spring Bones

Not too much to say about spring bones in the rig. I put a few in the hair so it would bounce around when the character moves its head. The only unique aspect is, just like the joints, I added the spring bones to my template so I wouldn’t have to add them in later with Cartoon Animator’s bone editor.

Face Setup: Smooth Mode

If you’re going to use Smooth Mode for your face expressions it has the added benefit that you only need to set up a ‘Normal’ eye and mouth sprite. You don’t need any of the other sprite expressions.

While the eye sprite is designed exactly the same for smooth mode with the Iris, Eye White, and Eye Mask sprites, the mouth requires a very different structure. My character I added an upper Eye lid sprite.

For the mouth of a human character you need a minimum of a mouth interior sprite, and upper and lower lip sprites with enough skin above and below to mask the mouth interior. Teeth sprites can be optionally added. For my character I included the upper teeth in the mouth interior sprite, and the lower teeth as a separate sprite.

Smooth Mode uses wire frame deforms to create all the various face expressions.

For the mouth and eye, any additional sprites added must have their own bone connected to the eye or mouth sprite, e.g. the Upper and Lower lip Sprites have their own bone connected to the mouth sprite bone – which would have the mouth interior sprite.

Once you have these sprites set up it’s just a case of going into the face setup editor in Cartoon Animator’s Composer, switching to Smooth mode for the eyes and mouth, then matching the facial expressions shown on your character using deforms and transforms.

Setting up my character’s G3-360 head. I did have an issue with the arms on the glasses not staying lined up that I mostly resolved but still need to tweak.

Face Setup: G3-360 Head

The way I rigged my character’s G3-360 head was pretty standard and is something I teach in my How to Rig G3 and G3-360 Character Heads Mini Course. The only unique aspect was that my character does not have the mouth and lower jaw masked by the face as the head turns from side to side.

I did this because I wanted my character to have a properly moving jaw that moves with the mouth and, since the character’s jaw design is quite prominently the whole lower face, there’s no real way to mask the mouth as the head turns.

The eye masking issue for outlined characters. Here you can see how the eye and eyebrow overlap the outline on the side of the face as it masks them during a head turn.

Face Setup: Eye Mask Fix for Outlined Characters

What is unique about my character’s G3-360 head is that I found a solution for fixing the face mask issue for outlined characters.

This problem occurs when the face features are being masked by the edge of the face but they appear to sit on top of the outline instead of being enclosed by the outline (as they would if the character was hand drawn).

To fix this I created an outline sprite for the face that is attached to its own bone, linked to the face bone. This outline deforms with the face sprite exactly so it matches the face outline at all times. However the outline is layered above the eye and mouth sprites so that, if they are masked by the edge of the face, they disappear under the outline instead of on top of it.

On my character it works quite well but was easier to implement since my face sprite never really needs to be deformed due to the whole lower jaw being a separate sprite.

Where to Next?

As mentioned if you want more detail on any of the above my full video complete with Motion Live demo is embeded below.

From here I still have to rig the side version of my TET avatar character, which I hope I can get done quickly given I only have to transfer most of my sprites into a side facing template, and then add my side facing hip sprite.

After that I want to make a start on rigging my title character of the series. The Resident Dragon himself, Red the fire dragon. It’s going to be quite a challenge I think, simply because he’s a quadruped with wings, who also stands and moves around like a human as well. It’s likely I’ll need both human and quadruped template versions to animate him fully.