How to Use Cartoon Animator with OBS and Motion Capture to Live Stream Your Cartoon Characters

[@NicolasJoye]

Worked first try... thanks!

[@animlife]

Have you got Cartoon Animator 5.3 or greater? If so, there's a whole new Puppet Live Stage tool added to the software that improves greatly on what this video shows. I have a newer video on it called 'How to create your own 2D VTuber avatar'.

[@TonyaRagene777]

This is really awesome! Thanks for sharing this

[@animlife]

Thank you. Hope you found it useful.

[@artstonemedia]

Had the same experience as above and there's no much Info online on how to solve the hitches. Maybe the motion capture is more of a beta version still.

[@animlife]

Make sure you're properly lit, and sitting close to the camera. There are detail settings you can tweak etc. Ultimately you do need a powerful system as well. I find the motion capture is good enough for quick motion capture that can be cleaned up later but not good enough for real time, live performance.

[@maxibi]

Very bad software, I got high end system RTX 4090, Ryzen 5950x still lagging.

[@animlife]

If you're using a webcam for the motion capture then yes, it's very laggy and hard to get accurate motion capture (not really suitable for live performance either). If you have an iPhone and spend the extra for the iPhone motion capture profile it's far better. I haven't personally tried it since I don't have an iPhone but I've watched someone set up the iphone mocap on their system after having used the webcam version for a while and they were amazed by how much more responsive the iPhone capture was.

[@maxibi]

@@animlife switched to adobe character animator.

[@animlife]

@@maxibi Whatever works for you. If motion capture is important to how you animate you've probably made the right move. Cartoon Animator isn't quite there yet with motion capture.

[@patlecat]

Sadly the motion capture hasn't worked any better if not worse in #CTA4 what a waste of money that was.

[@artstonemedia]

Thought I was the only one who noticed it ain't working much

[@animlife]

To be honest the motion capture wasn't really intended to be used for live streaming as I believe it is already pretty taxing on most systems. It goes without saying that you need a high specs machine to keep up with the load of motion capture/live stream and whatever else you have running. I do believe the iphone mo-cap profile is better than the webcam because the iphone has true depth perception. I mainly use motion capture for quickly animating short talk to camera style videos and I do the lip sync afterward.

[@patlecat]

@@animlife PC specs aren't the problem at all, but the very poor pattern matching, it fails consistently to recognice face features on the webcam when u wear glasses for example.

[@animlife]

@@patlecat It is recommended that you don't wear glasses when using facial motion capture because any reflection can throw it off. I generally don't usually wear my glasses. All I can say is, for the projects I've used it on, it's been good enough for me. I generally wouldn't use it for real time live streaming but I made this video just to show how you would do it if that's something you might want. There's much better systems out there that are dedicated to live performance avatars. CA5 would not be my first choice.

[@patlecat]

@@animlife Yeah but that's just lazy. OpenCV can ofc handle glasses quite well. And some ppl can't operate the PC without glasses, so...