Crazy Talk Animator Pro (PC) Review

” Crazy Talk is a great piece of software capable of creating fantastic animations”

Crazy Talk Animator Pro, by Reallusion, allows you to bring your creations to life on your screen in a fun and interesting way. You don’t even need to be able to draw your characters, as you can use almost anything to import images and turn them into interesting animations.

By anything, that means photographs, comics, sketches, paintings and anything else you can imagine. All this is achieved by a clever piece of software called the Crazy Talk engine, that converts a variety of popular media formats including JPG, PNG and BMP images, into objects that can be dragged into your animations and made to move.

The main idea about Crazy Talk Animator is to create your own actors and have them move around a background, and thus creating your very own animated movie. You do get a selection of ready-made actors to start out with, so if you want to jump right in and start making an animation you can. This is good for a beginner to get a feel for what’s possible and what isn’t. Within only a few minutes you can create a basic animation of your chosen character walking about a fictitious background.

Making your own actors is a little more complex, because before you can start moving them about the screen, you have to establish what seems to be a hundred or more parameters. Fortunately Crazy Talk does some of the work for you with its character-bone templates, but some things you really need to set up yourself for the best results. For example, to get facial expressions just right you have to establish the corners of the eyes and mouth of your chosen actors. This can be a bit fiddly at first, but once you get used to the process it becomes easier. After a while you’re able to quickly import photos and have them animated on the screen.

You will find that Crazy Talk Animator is somewhat difficult to get the hang of initially, but once you do it’s a lot of fun. The controls are more intuitive than some other animation software, which allows users to start work on their own animations straight away. Those who like to jump right in without reading the manual should fare okay, but you really get the best out of this software by using the advanced features, and you can only use those with a little tuition as to what all the settings do.

Features
It should be noted that Crazy Talk Animator Pro follows on from Crazy Talk 6, which has been around for some time. Crazy Talk 6 mainly focussed on facial expressions and the ability to animate faces and heads. Crazy Talk Animator Pro takes this a few steps further to include full body animations. You can even use your mouse to move your character in real time and record the gestures. This is a huge improvement over frame-by-frame editing.

Another advance is the 3D view object management that allows you to take control over almost everything on your virtual stage. The scene manager had a number of different views, so you can see everything from multiple perspectives that really allow you to track everything that’s going on.

More than that however, is a huge improvement in the timeline management. 16 tracks of animation control are provided, and separate facial motion tracks that allow you to fine-tune your animations.

A big benefit, which has been included in this version, is Crazy Talk’s twin editing engines. Whereas before you were limited to only one, now you have two completely different set-ups you can employ to get the best results. In composer mode, you can set up your environment and add objects and props. In stage mode however you get to move your character around and edit the actual animation steps that will make up your video.

Included in the software is a huge array of props and clip art to use in your animations, so you won’t need to spend an age searching for images on the ‘net to use. There are also tools to allow you to import sound files to compliment your animation creations. The automatic lip-syncing feature is a nice touch and works very well indeed, although you’ll probably find like with most things in this program that a little manual tweaking is necessary for the best results.

Overall
All in all, Crazy Talk is a great piece of software capable of creating fantastic animations. Beginners and advanced users alike can get great results using this software and it won’t take most people years to learn all the features. That being said, just when you think you’ve learnt all the features you need, you find something else that’s really cool and you wish you’d found it sooner.

Crazy Talk is also available in a standard version that is mainly for beginners, but the pro version gives you most of the features you really want to create realistic looking animations. For example, in order to use the custom facial motion or custom puppeteering profiles, you’ll need the pro version. The full-body photo-fitting feature is only available in the pro version as well, and this is probably one of the most useful features.

Even if you have little or no experience in animation, you’re sure to love using Crazy Talk. You’ll enjoy finding new and interesting ways to animate your characters and actors.

The ability to import in a multitude of different formats is a real bonus, as with other animation studios, much of the time was spent converting files into something the software can use. Not so with Crazy Talk, as you can import almost anything and get good result. Exporting the finished article is a breeze as well, as the software allows you to save your results in a variety of formats. The most popular would probably be .wmv, but you can also export to Xvid.

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