Journey through space with Steve, July’s free Adobe Character Animator puppet
Animation history is filled with superhero and supervillain aliens. Is Superman our first animated alien? Or is it Marvin the Martian? Who is your favorite animated alien? Could it be The Great Gazoo? The Boov? Stitch? Now you too can make animation history with Steve, a cyclops alien on a voyage through space, and July’s free Adobe Character Animator puppet. Is he good? Is he bad? You decide! Download today, before it becomes classified.
The Steve puppet was created by Dovid Taub: writer, illustrator, puppeteer, and video editor, as well as the founder and creative director at Shmideo. Taub shares, “As a kid, I always thought I’d be an animator, but the distance between idea and the finished product was often overwhelming. I discovered puppetry in my 20s and was drawn to the spontaneity. I loved that you could pick up a puppet and instantly bring it to life.”
Created as a physical puppet, Steve’s been transformed into a digital Character Animator puppet, with his mouth being controlled with Layer Picker. He comes with an array of replays and triggers, like the Arms Wave replay to show off his tentacle-like arms, as well as triggers with colors and sounds for the various buttons on his instrument panel. Taub adds, “Because the physical Steve puppet has a typical, flappy puppet jaw, I felt that neither of Character Animator’s traditional mouth options (Viseme Lip-sync or Nutcracker Jaw) would be a perfect fit. Fortunately, Character Animator has virtually infinite ways to do just about everything, so I leveraged the ‘Layer Picker’ behavior to turn a sequence of pre-recorded jaw movements into a microphone or camera-controlled mouth.”
Try today and start your animated voyage!
Resources:
- More example puppets are here.
- More fun free puppets at Okay Samurai’s page.
- Want to learn more about using Character Animator? Here you go.