250 professional backdrops for CrazyTalk Animator – free

My new pack of 250 quality professional animation backdrops for CrazyTalk Animator, converted from Odd Job Jack to .jpg and sorted into new themed folders. This is my selection of straight backgrounds, those which I think are worth having and usable, chosen from the 7,000 .png files in the ‘camera’ folders of the Odd Job Jack Season 3 art assets release. The original assets are freely and officially available in a torrent at www.oddjobjack.com if you want even more.

Download my CTA pack here (68Mb)

All backgrounds are licenced as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic. If you use these then please credit Smiley Guy Studios and the fine artists of Odd Job Jack in or alongside your movie, comic, illustration, or videogame, and include the original licence details.

* To install:

Extract, copy all folders and paste them to your CTA ‘Background’ folder at…

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Reallusion\Custom\CrazyTalk Animator Custom\Background

* To use in CTA:

Find this pack here in CTA…

Important! Ensure that all the thumbnail previews fully load in your chosen backgrounds folder, before trying to drag a background to the Stage — or else you will crash CTA.

Thanks also to the developer of the Windows utility Extract All Files, which enabled the automated extraction of 7,000 .png files from thousands of otherwise very fiddly camera sub-folders in the Odd Job Jack assets archive, which meant they could then be quickly scanned by eye for suitable images. Thanks also to Adobe for the automated .jpg mass conversion utility in Photoshop CS3. And finally thanks to BlueMidget, who originally tipped me off about the Odd Job Jack art assets release torrent, and to Smiley Guy Studios for releasing it to the public for free usage.

Custom heads tutorial for iClone

Katerina Patrick’s tutorial on how to make a new custom face and head in iClone, based on a standard Jana head…

New content pack for Crazy Talk Animator

I had another rummage for CTA props and backgrounds in the Odd Job Jack art assets release. These vector props for Crazy Talk Animator are Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic.

Download here (5Mb)

Props:

Image layers:

Chronological list of iClone historical clothing / characters

I was a bit cursory in my recent survey of historical costumes for iClone. Here’s a much more comprehensive list, linked and in chronological order.

Chronological list of iClone historical clothing / characters, available at May 2011

3D Creative launches new low-poly character tutorial series

The May 2011 issue of 3D Creative magazine launches a new in-depth tutorial series, on low-poly character modelling and hand-painted texturing. If you know how awesome a professional videogame character model can look, and yet still fit in just 15k with costume, then this four-part series may be one to follow. Teacher Tamara Bakhlycheva works in Maya, ZBrush, Deep Paint, and Photoshop.

“In this series Tamara will show us the entire process she uses to create the images from the concept through to the final production of the image.”

Shadows tutorial

Making stills with iClone? How do you Photoshop in the realistic shadows under people, afterwards? 3D World has the comprehensive answer online for free, with a video tutorial and a pack of sample files to download.

The tutorial is from the new edition of the magazine, which hits the UK magazine racks on 2nd June 2011. On the freebies DVD: “a full suite of mocap files”.

Medieval pack from Dexsoft

A free low-poly medieval pack from Dexsoft — as .fbx files, plus .obj and .3ds.

[ Hat-tip: Blue Midget ]