A few weeks back, Adobe released their 2015 Creative Cloud video applications into the world, and with that release came a fun little surprise.

Subtly tucked away in that update was a preview version of their new performance capture and animation tool, Character Animator. In essence, Character Animator's goal is to drastically simplify the animation process and to bring basic motion capture to anyone. The folks over at RocketStock (who sell rad After Effects templates), recently compiled a few of the latest Character Animator videos on the web, and we're going to share a few of them in a moment. But first, a quick reminder about what exactly Character Animator is and does. This comes from the Adobe blog post in which the new software was first introduced:

Adobe Character Animator brings still image artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator to life by capturing your performance using a camera and microphone, reproducing your facial expressions, synchronizing mouth movements to your speech, and giving you control over all aspects of a character’s movement through the mouse, keyboard, and programmable behaviors. You can simply perform to animate a character that you’ve acquired from someone else, or you can rig your own characters based on your own artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator. You can even write your own programmable behaviors or plug in behaviors from elsewhere.

So how does Character Animator fit into an Adobe workflow? Here's a full end-to-end tutorial that shows you how you can take a 2D character created in Photoshop or Illustrator, give them life in Character Animator, and then composite that character into a scene in After Effects:

And here's a more in-depth presentation from Adobe's Jason Levine about how Character Animator fits into the full Creative Cloud suite of video tools:

Adobe Character Animator is currently available as a preview in the current slate of Creative Cloud apps, and I'm pretty sure it's automatically installed if you already updated to After Effects CC 2015 (at least it was for me). So if you're interested, jump in and create some animations. There are a few more tutorials available from Adobe here, and there's a helpful support community/forum over on Adobe's site.

If you've already worked with Character Animator, let us know about your experience with it down in the comments!