Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator (CTA) — recognized among the easiest 2D animation software solutions — is releasing version 4.1, which opens CTA up to all mainstream PSD tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Krita, Affinity, Clip Studio and Photopea. Users of these PSD tools and Wacom tablets can now swiftly turn their creative concepts into animation using their original processes via Cartoon Animator.
“Reallusion enables artists with a clean, roundtrip workflow between digital content creation tools and Cartoon Animator,” said John C. Martin, VP of Product Marketing, Reallusion. “Now, the mutual connection between Cartoon Animator and mainstream PSD tools enables users to simultaneously work on their concept art and drive it to a final look while animating from even initial sketches. That means that through every stage of art from doodles to production there is an opportunity to send your drawings to Cartoon Animator already auto-rigged for animation and then return to edit the PSD and roundtrip to CTA without losing a single keyframe animation.”
Major new features and updates to CTA 4.1 include:
- Turn PSD into Scenes. Manageable scene elements can be created from PSD layers and sent to CTA for the arrangement of Z-depth. Use 3D depth to sort 2D scene elements and decide the relative order of characters and props.
- Turn PSD into Props. Import a PSD file as a prop and apply Elastic Motion effects to generate organic animations or follow PSD layer naming rules to group items and set object hierarchy for Compound Prop Animations.
- Turn PSD into Character Rigs. Rig any imaginable 2D character design with the Free Bone Tool or utilize PSD Character Templates for biped human and quadruped animals. Simply replace the image layers with your own design to automatically set up the character rig.
- Free PSD Editor. Photopea Reallusion’s alliance with Photopea provides this browser-based PSD editing service to all users for free. For those who don’t have a PSD editor at hand, this is a good option. CTA provides purchased users an AD free Photopea.
- From Sketch to Final Production. Wacom tablets users realize a pipeline for concept art to animation production. Start with storyboard sketches and bring them to CTA for animation. Keep updating the artwork while keeping the animation intact.
