The Bottom Line
- Very natural, easy-to-use interface.
- Produces stunning results very quickly.
- Imports from a number of formats.
- Exports into many highly-customizable formats for many uses.
- Eliminates much of the editing work with amazing feature recognition.
- Still warps a little bit like most such software types, but not much.
- Can be a little hard to get the mouth definition correct.
- Leaving the eyes "as-is" can result in odd twitches.
- The pre-set eyes don't quite look natural, a little creepy.
Description
- CrazyTalk 4.0 is a full-featured human interface animation software package program.
- Capable of animating humans, animals, objects, or cartoons and imbueing them with speech and life.
- Supports a variety of image formats.
- Animations can be created in a very quick, easy, and intuitive process, using a smooth interface.
- Exports quickly and easily to a number of desired formats with just the click of a button.
- Comes complete with dozens of pre-set ranges of emotions to make each animation sequence unique.
Guide Review - CrazyTalk 4.0
Not so with CrazyTalk. When I first opened the software, I was greeted by a photograph of a model; curious, I pressed "play" to hear the welcome message...
....and watched as she began to speak to me in a lively, expressive fashion.
The animation was stunning. Her head moved; her eyes shifted with inflections of expression, her lips moved fluidly without warping as her jaw moved appropriately. All right then, I thought. But can I do this myself? Is it going to be a pain to even produce any results?
Five minutes later, I was staring at a sketch of one of my original characters while it chattered away at its stunned creator, lips and eyes moving in smiling unison. I'd imported the drawing, and set four key points; then I assigned a voice--I used a preset, but you can import your own--clicked "play", and let myself be amazed.
There were a few odd warps and pulls, but on a slightly angled shot; on dead-on face shots, it works much better, and the feature recognition engine is absolutely amazing. In five minutes, CrazyTalk 4.0 had done what would take me over a month to animate by hand.
What Reallusion has done with this software is remarkable, and I'd recommend it for anyone with a need for a complex human-interface program.
