Newbie question Re Creating Characters

Hi All, Im looking for some help in building my characters.
I took a CAT5 Character into Clip studio paint and started to replace my character parts into the correct files and deleted what I imported.
When going back into Cartoon Animator with my Character using the face key editar things did not work properly. I tried again with the most up to date Characters in CAT5 and without doing anything in clip studio paint returned to Cartoon Animater and they did not function in the same way as they did before I took them into Clip studio paint.
My question is do I have to edit in Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for things to work properly?
Most of the tutoriales say Photoshop or illustrator… The Cartoon Animator software guides towards Adobe.
I read a post about this subject of 3 years ago and one suggestion was to get an old copy of Photoshop and illustrator from ebay.
Has anyone got any ideas for me? Any suggestions would be welcome.
I don´t really have the money to subscribe to adobe.
I live on a disabled pension and I only have an hour a day to be creative with Cartoon Animator.
My next move will be to try the trial of Photoshop and Illustrator to see how that works… That will tell me if it is in fact a Clip studio paint thing or not.
But I would like to hear what more experenced Animators have to say
Best Regards
Richard

You will find a free written tutorial in the description of the webinar I hosted on the subject at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZquezfy4Q&t=878s&ab_channel=Reallusion

And another version, with a different approach, can be seen in this webinar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl3MHS9p7SM&t=1721s&ab_channel=Reallusion

Hope this helps. Otherwise, send me an email to garrypye@reallusion.com and I will help more.