Adobe Character Animator revealed

A few months ago, we showed a sneak-peek of a work in progress that we were referring to as Project Animal. We’re now revealing Adobe Character Animator, the newest addition to the Adobe Creative Cloud family of applications.

Adobe Character Animator brings still image artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator to life by capturing your performance using a camera and microphone, reproducing your facial expressions, synchronizing mouth movements to your speech, and giving you control over all aspects of a character’s movement through the mouse, keyboard, and programmable behaviors. You can simply perform to animate a character that you’ve acquired from someone else, or you can rig your own characters based on your own artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator. You can even write your own programmable behaviors or plug in behaviors from elsewhere.

I have never had more fun with a piece of software, and I can’t wait to see how you all make use of this utterly delightful creative application.

We will soon be releasing Adobe Character Animator as a preview. This means that we think that it’s ready to be used in real animation workflows, but we also know that we need more input from you to bring it to the level of completeness and quality that you’ve come to expect from Adobe creative applications. When you use Adobe Character Animator, you’ll be able to submit feedback through a forum linked to directly from the application itself. We want to hear from you so that we can build the best possible experience for you.

Adobe Character Animator will be installed along with the upcoming version of After Effects and can be started from within After Effects.

For more information about Adobe Character Animator, go here.

To see a big sneak peek of all of the new and exciting things coming in Adobe’s professional video and audio applications and services, see this page and this post on the Creative Cloud blog. You can also see a playlist of videos demonstrating the new features here.

Join us at NAB, at booth SL-5110, on April 11-14 to see these features and improvements in action. See this page for a schedule of presentations at NAB.

Because we’re just revealing these features now, you won’t yet have access to them through Creative Cloud, but you can make sure that you get them as soon as they’re available by subscribing now. See this page for details. For more information about Creative Cloud, see this overview video and the Creative Cloud FAQ list.

Have a great NAB, folks!