Illustrator or Photoshop

Funny, I was actually thinking you might have blurred them a little bit on purpose after I sent the post!
I like how you think of the details! I just upgraded my video some adjustments to the eyes and the blink.... after you watch something 20 times you tend to notice the little details!

So do you mean the Photoshop file is probably huge? Yes I wrote above that I started with about 2000 by 2000 pixels. Then I used dynamic linking into Premiere(thankfully). I think it might be a little slower, but its so cool that I can decide to change the eyes and blink in Photohop, save, and then it updates in Character Animator and updates into Premiere and BOOM, I have an updated movie! The only problem I had was creating a sequence from the imported CH file, which then made the sequence the wrong size.... Oops! You can do the same with After Effects, I wonder if I should do that next time.... do you find the editing to be up to par in After Effects?

My MacBook is a late 2012! I guess I need an upgrade too..... just always a pain.

Keep on sharing your work! Love to see it.

Cheers!
mark

Thats awesome, so that is probably a huge file? I'm running into limitations on my early 2015 macbook I've got to upgrade this summer to keep making things.

In my video I actually blurred the backgrounds on purpose to keep the focus on the character, something I've been messing around with a little bit. I do my characters in CH then move them to AE where I pretty much add backgrounds, most movements, and sometimes I'll just complete the video in there but I like to piece together scenes in Premiere lately...my macbook doesn't like all these files much though!

I guess it can be a preference. But I prefer using Photoshop. I can create Vector shapes with the pen tool just like I can in Illustrator.... but I can also take a photo of a stuffed Monkey and Animate him, and create triggers that show him smoking, but adding a cigarette, and creating a frame by frame animation of smoke. With Photoshop you can cut up ANYTHING, a cartoon, a photo, 3D character, claymation looking character, stuffed animal, a plant, etc!

Here is a stuffed Animal cut up in Photoshop - Fun with Adobe Character Animator | Stuffed Monkey - YouTube

And here is a Cartoon Character also cut up in Photoshop - Happy Birthday from Dr. Laura - Created with Adobe Character Animator - YouTube

I guess preference or what application you know of course can help. But I can cut up any graphic in Photoshop so I feel like it expands my creativity a bit.

Hope this helps!
mark

“User friendly” is probably a question of what you know!

I use Illustrator on the theory that vector artwork can scale more easily without pixelization (e.g. can zoom in on eyes).  But if you did a high res photoshop file that would probably work too (but I wonder if would be slower because of the very large raster file?)

I personally like that Illustrator I can add and remove things easily (I can add/remove groups, change layer orders, etc) - Photoshop if you modify a raster in a layer, you cannot disect it again later if needed (because its all in the one bitmap). So Illustrator feels a little safer in case I need to pull apart the artwork and I just did not realize it when I started drawing.

Illustrator also feels (to me) a bit more “structured“ in terms of the layers (like its normal to do), which aligns with CH’s importance on the structure - but that may simply be my ignorance of Photoshop since I don’t use it much.