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About The Lazy Animator

David Arandle (TET).
I've read both these books
and more.
Anyone, but particularly animators, will tell you that creating animation requires a lot of work and effort. 

Sometimes just a single second of quality animation can take hours to complete. Obviously this isn't viable or ideal for animators just starting out, or independent creators, who need to make a lot of animation quickly.

The Lazy Animator website is intended to be a resource for animators of all skill levels looking for ways to create more animation with less effort, so they can make even more animation in the same amount of time (or just make the same amount of animation in less time).

The site is not for animation purists who want to lovingly make high quality, hand drawn, 2D animated master pieces. If that's you then by all means stick to your guns, your work is awesome. Rather it's for animators who just want to get their animated stories made with just enough animation to get their message across.

Created by me (David Arandle (TET)). I founded my own animation and design service, Art Time Productions, in 1997, and I'm a veteran of using 'drag'n'drop' sites like Vyond (formerly GoAnimate), PowToons, Animaker, Plotagon, and more. I've even run my own business making explainer videos with Vyond for more than ten years.

In 2012 I discovered Reallusion's Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator) Software, which really is the ultimate 2D animation studio for anyone trying to produce quality animation quickly.

Reallusion recognized my ability with their software and made me a Certified Reallusion Trainer.

I'm also a strong advocate for using free, opensource, and low cost software whenever possible. I generally only buy software if I can't find a free alternative. If you think you can't get into animation because it's too expensive you're wrong. There's literally free software options for almost every platform.

Hopefully you'll find this site becomes more and more useful as I add more courses, tutorials, and resources to it.

Have fun and, if you sign up to receive updates via email, you'll be able to email me with any feedback, suggestions, or thoughts you may like to put forward.


David Arandle (TET)
The Lazy Animator

Popular Courses and Tutorials:

The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator - The Fastest Way to Learn Reallusion's 2D Animation Software Application

IMPORTANT: This Course is still current for Cartoon Animator 5. All principles taught are identical to the current version. The only major difference is the implementation of the new Smart Content Manager. The course now includes an additional video to explain the differences between version 4 and 5's Content Managers. How much value do you put on your time? $10 an hour? $50 an hour? $200 an hour, or more? While you can learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 using free tutorials, you can spend hours of your time looking for tutorials that don't actually address what you're trying to learn, or worse, may not even exist.  Don't waste hours of your valuable time when you can learn all the main animation features of Cartoon Animator, and become a power user, fast, for just USD$49.95 , without having to navigate all the official video tutorials that don't really cover everything in a logical order, or show how everything is connected ..

The Fastest Way to Rig a Character in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator - A How To Tutorial

One of the biggest hurdles for beginner animators, new to Reallusion's Cartoon Animator Studio , is learning how to rig their own character designs from scratch. While Reallusion has worked very hard to make the process easier it still can seem complex and overwhelming, particularly now that CA's flagship, G3-360 character rigs are being adapted to work with live motion capture and pre-animated 3D motion files. Fortunately, by combining some of CA4's newest features (G3-360 body rigs and Bone hands) with one of its oldest (Morph-based heads), newcomers can get into animating their own character quickly and easily. The Lazy Animator tutorial, The Fastest Way to Rig a Character in Cartoon Animator , uses just one custom character sprite, and takes, around an hour or so (once you're familiar with the process) to rig a relatively simple, but still quite versatile character. The course is presented as a 19 page PDF document, with just two steps per page and clear diagrammati

How to Import Vector Images into Reallusion's Cartoon Animator (without Adobe Flash) and Apply Render Styles

Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 used to feature vector images more prominently for character and prop creation back when it was launched as CrazyTalk Animator 2 . So much so that they built into the application a Render Styles system that made it easy to recolor vector images if you took the extra steps to create vector color groupings for G2 vector characters and props. Unfortunately G2 Vector characters weren't the success story Reallusion hoped for, proving to be too difficult for the average user to make, and they also required Adobe Flash (now Animate CC) for which many users weren't willing to invest in a subscription. Since then  CrazyTalk Animator 3 , and now Cartoon Animator 4 , have focused more on high resolution bitmaps to create quality characters and props, however the Render Styles system and support for vector images still remains. Reallusion Not Interested in SVG Support? The only vector file supported by Cartoon Animator is Adobe's SWF format which i