10 Top Tips for Creating Unique Character Designs

By Melody Nieves

Everyone has a favorite cartoon character, but how did they first come to life? A lot of research and love goes into creating universally recognized characters.

So today we’re bringing you ten great tips for everything you need to know about character design, using amazing examples from Envato Market.

1. Pick a Theme

Starting a new character design is like looking at a blank canvas. It’s exciting, yet scary, and might even make you break out in hives. So the key to keeping your cool under pressure is to first pick a theme.

See how this character has a clear sailor theme?

What do you want someone to see, feel, or understand immediately when they look at your characters? Allow that feeling to fuel the general makeup of your theme.

12 Principles of Animation by Alan Becker

1. Squash and Stretsch

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it’s broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often

2. Anticipation

This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher’s wind-up or a golfers’ back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality

How to Make An Animatic

In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called “animatics” to give a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together. (Wikipedia)

Credit anim8eduk·

Watch “CrazyTalk Animator 2 Sneak Peek” on YouTube

Try ot out. Easy and completely masterable

Shared via Android mobile

CrazyTalk Animator Tutorial – Turn Your Photo into Animated Character

One of the coolest features of CrazyTalk Animator is the ability to take a picture of you or any of your friends and turn it into a character that you can animate on-screen! You can even take your friends face and place it on a silly-looking body and make it dance around. Sound like fun? Check out this tutorial for an intro on how to do it!

CrazyTalk Animator 2 Tutorial – Getting Started with CrazyTalk Animator 2

http://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/a…
There are a whole ton of new features and tools with the 2nd generation of CrazyTalk Animator, and all kinds of new animation possibilities as a result. This tutorial will introduce you to a lot of these new improvements, and how they can be used in a quick and simple way. You’ll learn about the 3D Motion Key Editor, Human IK, walk cycles, sprite replacement, Render Style, and more!

CrazyTalk Animator Tutorial – Intro to Actor Creation

There are so many different ways to animate your characters in CrazyTalk Animator, so it’s only natural that there are just as many character types to animate! In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the different types of functional characters and the different ways you can assemble them from different elements using the various actor creation options. Become familiar with sprite-based, morph-based, and even hybrid actors!

By CrazyTalkTutorial·

Dialogue in 2D Animation

DIALOG

The principles explained in this tutorial can be applied to 3D or Flash animation. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll deal with six basic static shapes. Using these shapes, you’ll be able to animate any line of dialog.

NOTE: The AF system of dialog animation was developed by companies like Hanna Barbera on the TV shows of the 1960s.

 Find out more http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/03t/talk1.shtml

Adobe Flash : Motion Tweening

By flashvideotutorials·

An Introduction to Flash

By JesseMeza07

Toon Boom Animate : A Professional 2D Animation Software

Toon Boom Animate Intro Video

Puppet Pin Animation – After Effects Video Tutorial

By CG Swot

Fast Food – The Infographics Show

An example of motion graphics with infographic elements.

Motion Graphics: Andrej Preston (http://www.andrejpreston.com)
Narration by Dorian Douglass (http://www.doriandouglass.com)

Rigging and Animating 2D Characters in After Effects

By Digital-Tutors

Character Rigging in Flash

Basic Flash Animation : Sunrise

To learn some basic in animation check this out.

The Deco Tool in Adobe Flash

Some Deco Tools usage

One of the new features in Flash CS5 is the Deco drawing tool (although, actually, the Deco tool is not a new feature as it was first added to Flash CS4.) It allows you to create drawings and animation based on dynamic shapes and colors. It is one of the smart tools that can save time and effort by creating drawing objects and animation using ready symbols and objects, or loading custom symbols from the library

Using Deco Tool in Flash CS 5 (Link)

Basic Deco Tool

Basic in Flash CS4

Adobe Flash Tutorial- Introduction to Actionscript 2

This is the very basic in Actionscript 2.0. I’m using 2.0 version is just because for the sake of Asas Multimedia course. Those who know 3.0 are welcome to use it.

Good luck with the projects.. 🙂