Happy Animated New Year!

We wish you a very happy new year with three free template puppets.

Frenchie, Foxie, and Bunnie are three buddies from Brooklyn here to help you celebrate! A little bit sweet and totally low-poly hip, these friends are ready to star in your stories of urban adventure and modern life. We wish you a fun-filled animated new year with these new free template puppets.

The Brooklyn Buddies were inspired by the wide variety of mediums that Character Animator transforms into puppets. You don’t have to be an illustrator to create fully loaded puppets that can walk, talk, and gesture. You can take photos of real toys or other objects, create digital collages, or, in this case, sculpt a simple 3D model to serve as your Character Animator puppet artwork.

Created by freelance artist Emily Watts, who comes from a design background but always wanted to be an animator, this new technology made it possible for her to get started in animation and create a new show. The Weather Girls are three imaginative best friends who produce their own award-winning news show from their studio in Santa Monica, California.

For creating short-form narrative animations the three most important features to Emily are the ability to walk, talk, and turn heads smoothly. So, these puppets combine all three. For super smooth head turns, you might want a lot of different angles on your artwork — so that’s why she explored 3D modeling for these puppets. It allowed her to save images of the heads rotated just 10 degrees between each turn without having to redraw artwork for each. The same could be done by photographing a physical toy or puppet.

Emily says, “You don’t have to know how to draw to be an animator.” Using nontraditional puppet artwork allows anyone to be able to create awesome original characters. When getting started in animation, it’s important to build momentum in your learning. If you can get to the Character Animator part of the process quickly, you’ll be amazed at how much you can create even when you’re using basic parts of the program. Explore a variety of puppet-building forms and get there quicker using photography, collage, Characterizer, 3D modeling (like Emily did), kids’ drawings, or, of course, using these and other Adobe sample puppets.

These puppets come with a separate background. Emily uses backgrounds in conjunction with walking puppets. You can set it up to scroll automatically along with the walk behavior like Okay Samurai explained in a Tips & Tricks a while back.

Emily also happens to be the voice for all of her characters. She uses a third-party plug-in called VoicePitcher by ToneBoosters. It works with both Adobe Audition and Apple Logic, and comes in a software package from ToneBoosters called BusTools 3.

Dive right in, and best wishes for a Happy New Year!

Download the three new free puppets and background here. Want to learn more about using Character Animator? Here you go!