Avoid Last Minute Holiday Shopping and Stay Home Animating!
Spend your time this holiday season animating with Laxmi! The 3D-style puppet Laxmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth, good fortune, prosperity, and beauty. On the night of Diwali, the biggest festival of India, Laxmi visits the homes of her fans to spread her good wishes and luck. With just a webcam, a mic, and Adobe Character Animator, you can animate the design yourself using face tracking and automatic lip sync.
Artist and entrepreneur Shailja Gupta is launching her passion project, DesiPopWorld, a New York City-based tech-entertainment startup creating Bollywood Fandom merchandising and licensing ecosystems for South Asian IP through AI-driven storytelling. Their first series, “From The Sidelines,” is a mixed-media digital puppet talk show with “DesiPopToonies” using Adobe Character Animator. Launching next month on YouTube, the web series features Laxmi and Santa. Follow @DesiPopWorld and find out more about their upcoming teaser.
Santa and Laxmi are friends and neighbors! Who knew? Of the series, Shailja says, “The joining of the forces of Laxmi and Santa is my way of showcasing how two different cultures may share similar philosophies. I feel strongly that these kinds of conversations are needed, and the medium of digital puppetry provides us a convenient and creative way to do it.”
DesiPopWorld’s mission, Shailja notes, “is to tell fun and educational stories of South Asian icons and mascots. The Laxmi puppet is our way of sharing her wealth by offering this puppet to all those fellow artists who get creative and imaginative ideas from this absolutely marvelous piece of software.”
Laxmi has a variety of facial expressions as well as triggers and replays. She can smile, look shocked, unimpressed, or mad! She’s got gestures like pointing or thumbs up and down. She has multiple replays including a zoom and a replay animating all of her many arms. This puppet was created in conjunction with Digital Puppets, a cartoon studio based in the U.K. offering custom character designs in both 2D and 3D renders.
There are other holiday puppet friends you might want to consider animating, including Bluster the vector snowman with head parallax, dangling scarf, and snowy background. There is also Wendigo, the snowy creature with head turns and breathing. And let’s not forget snowgirl Aurora with separate Dangle behaviors for her scarf and hat. And last but not least, Block Man Santa with blinking eyes, a choice of hair colors, draggable arms, and editable T-shirt and trousers for quick wardrobe changes.
’Tis the Season to Get Animated!
Download snowgirl Aurora here, and Block Man Santa can be found here.
Bluster and Aurora were designed by Dave Werner, the amazing senior experience designer for Character Animator. You might know him as Okay Samurai. And if you don’t, well, you should — he’s created the best video tutorials for Character Animator.
Want to learn more about using Character Animator? Here you go!