Video Tutorials

Here are the video tutorials which will guide you through the various concepts of animating in Creature.

Quickstart

Watch this tutorial for a quick introduction into the general animation workflow of Creature. This tutorial will go through meshing, rigging and animating a dinosaur character with a basic walk cycle. The user will also be introduced to doing dynamic effects like floppy tails and bouncy gaits using Creature's powerful Physics Motors.

Another Quickstart tutorial in the same spirit as the one above. Watch how to import a fairy atlas image, mesh, rig and animate a simple walk cycle with dynamic effects using Creature's Procedural motor system.

The sample project for this tutorial can be found here.

Bone Motors Overview

Watch this tutorial to learn about the most commonly used Bone Motors in Creature. This video is recommended for users starting out in Creature.

The character art is by - killyoverdrive . Artwork is published with CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Mesh Motors Overview

Watch this tutorial to learn about the most Mesh Motors in Creature. These powerful motors operate directly on the vertices of your region meshes allowing you achieve some rather intricate/sophisticated mesh deformation effects. Mesh Motors are a Creature Pro Feature.

The Zombie character art is Copyright O.T.K Games.

How to Animate Secondary Motion

This tutorial teaches you how to add Secondary Motion to your characters. Secondary Motion brings your character to life, making the overall animation a lot more fluid and less stiff. Secondary Motion in Creature is easily accomplished using the powerful Procedural Motor System. A variety of techniques are covered, including the usage of Bend Physics Motors, Pin Rope Motors and Mesh Soft Body Dynamics Motors.

The character art is Copyright O.T.K Games.

How to Animate Tentacles

This tutorial teaches you how to animate a simple Tentacle Rig in the Creature Animation Tool. It demonstrates a couple of techniques for the user to choose from: Direct Curve Pose Drawing, IK Posing, Pin Rope Physics Posing as well as fast, easy Idle Animation via Creature's powerful procedural motor system. With Creature's Procedural Motor System, animating complicated tentacle chains becomes a very easy and fun process.

Workflow + Keyboard Shortcuts

Demonstrates the Rigging and Animation Workflow, including useful Keyboard Shortcuts that will aid you in asset authoring + animation.

Shape Skewing/Stretching, Curve Posing & Pose Capture

This tutorial demonstrates the new Stretching, Skewing Cage Bone Widget for Creature. It also shows how to pose a chain of bones directly via curve drawing. The tutorial also covers the Pose Capture Library Functionality, allowing you to capture and use a library of character animation poses.

Rig Templates

This tutorial shows you how to use the Rig Templates functionality. Rig Templates allow you to install a pre-built skeletal rig structure from a Creature Rig File onto your current character. It also allows you to group bones to parts, making assignment of Bone Weighting Regions a much more efficient and easier process.

Watch the video tutorial here

Animate a Running Fox Character

This tutorial shows you how to very quickly animate a running Fox character in the Creature Animation Tool. This is done using the powerful procedural motor system of Creature in order to achieve fast, high-quality running + secondary motion.

Watch the video tutorial here

Quadruped Character Animation

Teaches you now to animate a quadruped character using Creature's procedural motor system.

Artwork: Dmitry Bogdanov

Front Facing Idle Motion Animation

Teaches you now to animate a front facing character using Creature's procedural motor system. Breathing motion is performed using a combination of move bounce, rotate cycle and bend motors.

Artwork: OTK Games

Flapping Bird Animation

Teaches you how to animate a simple flapping bird with a dynamic floppy tail.

Artwork: David Revoy

Swimming Orca Animation

Teaches you how to animate a swimming Orca in under 3 minutes.

Girl with Long Hair blowing in the Wind

Teaches you how to animate front facing characters with long hair blowing in the wind.

Rigging & Meshing Tutorial

Learn the concepts of meshing and rigging in this video guide.

Meshing

Basics:

In Depth:

Rigging

Bone Weighting Modes

View a video tutorial on the different Bone Weighting Modes here.

Resolving Rigging Issues

Understand how to resolve some commonly encountered rigging issues. If you have problems getting your shapes to pose correctly, please watch this video.

Meshing Tips

Learn about some tips regarding the meshing to rigging pipeline. This covers the topics of adding/re-arranging parts in the meshing mode and learning how to sync up the newly meshed regions with the ones in actual rig. It also covers the advanced export functionality which allows you to tweak the export resolution of your character mesh for optimized Game Engine export. ( For Pro Version )

Rigging Tips, Tricks & Shortcuts

This tutorial covers some additional Rigging Tips and Tricks for the Creature Animation Tool. It goes through shortcuts for the various modes ( Bone, Region and Weight ) as well as some discussion on Auto vs Manual Weighting for Bones.

Animating with Knots and Splines Tutorial

These video guides teach you how to set animation data over the timeline. It also goes through manipulating animation curves through the spline editor.

IK & Automated Walkcycle Tutorial

Learn how to use IK as well as employ powerful IK Rotate motors to automatically generate walk cycles.

Deep AI Walk Tutorial

Learn to use the cutting-edge feature in Creature Pro ( Windows ) to generate realistic Human Walk Cycles via the power of Deep AI!

Character Art: David Revoy, CC BY 3.0

Physics Tutorial

This video guide teaches you how to apply the very versatile physics motors into your animation when any kind of simulated dynamics is required. The part of the tutorial dealing with Soft Body Physics is for users of the Pro Version.

Control Points Motor for Mesh Deformation

Learn how to use the Control Points Motor to deform your meshes. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Mesh FFD Deformation with Grid Motor

Learn how to use the powerful Grid Mesh Motor to deform you meshes. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Wing Flapping Tutorial

Employ powerful Wing Flapping Mesh Motors as well as Physics Motors to author some wing flapping motion in this tutorial. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Path Authoring and Motion along Paths

Learn how to author and transfer motion along paths in this tutorial. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Path Bone Motor for Advanced Path Authoring

Learn how to do advanced path authoring using the Path Bone Motor. This is an alternate and cleaner method to do path motion authoring. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Leg Motor for Advanced 3 Joint Limb Motion

Learn how to use the sophisticated Leg Motor to achieve complex 3 joint limb motion.

Mocap Transfer Studio Tutorial

Motion Transfer Studio is a powerful new feature available for Windows Creature Pro users. (Mac support will follow) This allows you to import Biovision BVH files that contain 3D Motion Capture Data and then transfer that motion onto your 2D character. Using this feature, 3D motion capture data becomes a form of input for animating 2D characters in Creature, allowing you to produce compelling and high quality results in a very short amount of time.

Motion Capture and Transfer Tutorial

Use Motion Capture to define and track markers with a provided input video. Learn how to transfer the tracker marker motion over to your animations. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Growing Vines with Simple Transform Mesh Motor

This tutorial shows you how to create a vine plant that grows along a chain of bones using the Simple Transform Mesh Motor. This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Face Warp Tutorial

Learn how to use the advanved Face Warp functionality of Creature to animate front facing characters with slight head tilts/rotations.

This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Rig Import & Transfer Tutorial

Demonstrates the Rig Import and Transfer feature of Creature. This allows you to import an external rig with animations into your current setup. It is useful when you want to transfer the bone/rig structure of another character onto a new target with a similar structure but different appearance. This is Pro feature.

Artwork by: David Revoy, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Advanced Humanoid Animation Tutorial

Demonstrates how to animate a humanoid using some of Creature's advanced procedural motors to achieve sophisticated flesh, cloth and other dynamic motion.

Artwork by: OTK Games, Copyright OTK Games

This tutorial is for users of the Pro Version.

Animation Looping Tutorial

Demonstrates how to use the Animation Loop Analysis Tool in Creature to achieve looping animations.

Sprite Swapping with Sprite Frame Manager

Demonstrates how to swap in external sprite images into parts/regions of your character animation using the powerful Sprite Frame Manager.

Sprite Swapping Tips

This tutorial shows you how to prepare your rig and mesh for Sprite Swapping as well as use the Simple Transform Mesh Motor to scale and translate your mesh live in animation mode.

Animate Mesh Region Ordering

This tutorial shows you how to Animate the Order of your Mesh Regions in Creature using the new Animate Regions Order Tool. You can keyframe the order of the regions over time with this new functionality.

Bone Tracking + Animating Reins

Demonstrates the Track Bone Functionality of Creature. This also illustrates how you can animate reins on a character with a combination of Pin Rope Physics and Bone Tracking.

Bone Chain Posing using Stylus Swipes (Pen & Tablet)

Demonstrating the new Bone Curve Posing feature of Creature. This allows you to pose a chain of FK bones in one movement using either the Stylus (Pen & Tablet) or Mouse. Select a chain of FK bones, Shift + Drag to Draw Curve and Pose Bones. This is a Pro version Feature.

Custom Cycle Motor

Demonstrates the Custom Cycle Motor, a Procedural Motor that allows you to capture Manual Keyframe Animation and then play it back as an automatic looping motion. This essentially allows you to combine the flexibility and control of manual animation with the full power of Creature's Procedural Motor Animation System. This is a Pro version Feature.

Lip Syncing Tutorial

Demonstrates the new Lip Syncing functionality in Creature via the Papagayo Open source tool. This is a Pro version Feature.

Authoring Cloth with Wind Dynamics

Demonstrates the new Force Field Motor framework of Creature. This tutorial teaches you how to author a cloth like object in Creature and then apply some wind forces on it using the Force Field Motor framework.. This is a Pro version Feature.

Authoring a Tree blowing in the Wind

This tutorial teaches you how to animate a tree that sways with the wind. This is accomplished using a combination of Bend Physics Motors and the Directional Force Field Motor. This is a Pro version Feature.

Pixel Art, Motion Blur & other Video Effects

This tutorial covers the Post Process Effects framework of Creature. It allows you to apply various filter effects to the resulting output video of the animation, including filters for Pixel Art, Shimmer, Motion Blur, 3D Lighting and more. The final video can be exported out as a sequence of images, a Gif or Movie file.

Artwork by: OTK Games, Copyright OTK Games

Motion Enhancers

This tutorial covers the Motion Enhancer Toolset of Creature. Motion Enhancement is a set of tools that modifies existing FK Motion for Bones. Each Motion Enhancer will analyse and then perform a specific type of action for the selected bone or group of bones based on the current FK Motion. These include adding springy physics effects, amplifying or reducing the current FK Motion. This is a Pro version Feature.

Normal Map and Lighting Preview Tool

Demonstrates the Normal Map and Lighting Preview Tool in Creature. This allows you to preview how a character in Creature will be lighted up with an input normal map, allowing for 3D type lighting, depth and bump effects on you characters.

The later part of the tutorial also brings the character into UE4 and uses the normal map to light up the character using UE4's lighting system. This is a Pro version Feature.

Artwork by: Mitchell Vizensky

Animation Rig Layout Graph

Demonstrates the Animation Rig Layout Graph Visualiser. This feature allows you to view how your bone motors are arranged in your character based on class type. Easily select/hide/show various motors and their classes using this functionality.

Artwork by: Katarzyna Zalecka, CC-BY-SA 3.0