Hey everyone, this is Dave from the Adobe
Character Animator team, and today I'm incredibly excited to announce
that we have officially added body tracking into Adobe character animator
as part of our Adobe Max 2021 release. This is something
that's been in beta for a while. You guys have given us
a lot of great feedback, and now it is finally out for everyone
to be able to try. If you haven't tried it yet,
body tracking is an awesome new way to do your performance
capture animation. So instead of fiddling around with keyframes or the dragger tool
or something like that, you can just act and talk naturally and have a translate
into an animated performance. Whether that's just you, you know, moving
your arms to accentuate certain parts or doing a full body character dance
to bring your puppet to life. So this is a major topic,
and we're breaking up this video into three different parts. So we'll start off with performance
basics, how to set up your camera, how far back you want to stand,
lighting conditions, all of that stuff. Then we'll move into
recording and editing. How do you record a take
with body tracking? And if you make a mistake, like let's say you want to rerecord
part of your arms or something like that? How would you go about doing that? And then finally, we'll end up
for those of you who want to add body
tracking to your own custom characters. We'll go through the rigging process
of first how to add it to a torso up character in the arms. Moving on to a full body character, there's a lot to pack in here,
so let's get started. So if you want to try a body tracking,
the best way to get started is on the homescreen. We have eleven example characters
that are rigged for body tracking, so that includes Chloe
Hopscotch the Frog, Sam, Stardust, Al, Tull The Cat, Bongo the Gorilla, Footy,
Ninja, Thorn and Heather. All of these characters have body tracking
enabled, so you can click on any of them and test out the feature yourself. And if that's not enough, they're even more characters
on our official body tracker website. This has all these videos
and more information about body tracking, so if you're interested in learning more,
that's a great place to go as well. But for the purposes of demoing today,
I'm going to focus on two characters for a torso up character. I'm going to focus
over here on Tull the cat and for a full body character,
I'm going to go to Hopscotch the Frog. So let's get started with told the cat. All right, so I've opened up my character
Tull the cat here and I'm starting to wave my arms around
and nothing's happening. Well, that's because body trackers,
then you've got to turn on and off. By default, body tracking
takes up a lot of processing power. And if we left it on all the time, you'd probably run
into a few performance issues. So our recommendation is turned on
when you need it and turn it off when it's not needed, and that might help
you optimize things a little bit. So check out the camera
microphone panel up here. You see, I've got my normal webcam icon on microphone icon, and added to that
now is the body tracker icon. So as soon as I click on this body trigger
icon on Turn It Blue. You'll notice that I start to get things
on my shoulders showing up here. Now this is only going to work
if the character actually has a body behavior
down here that is active. So check out what happens
if I turn this off. If I disable disarm the body behavior
and now I try it, I'm gonna get a warm warning message that says,
Hey, body training requires a puppet with an armed, active
and enabled body behavior. So that's just a safeguard for you to,
you know, if a character isn't rigged for body tracking
and you try to turn it on and then you see nothing's happening. Hopefully, that message will come up
and inform you what the issue is. OK, so for a torso of character
like Tully Cat here, I'm going to turn my body tracking on
and then as I move my hands around, he's going to start doing some stuff.
But it doesn't look that great right now. It looks like I don't have my full hand movement, and that's
because I'm too close to the webcam. So you're probably used to animating
sitting down close to the computer like this sitting down. But for best results with body tracking,
you're going to have to stand up. You need full hour
movement, full body movement. And so take that chair. Put it away. Stand back
a little bit more mature. Almost fell down there. Stand back a little bit
and this is how you want to do it now. Right now, my character's not looking
that great, right? His head is kind of stretched up.
Something's not working right. And that's because I haven't
calibrated the character yet. So what I'm going to do
is see this little calibrate button. This used to be called set rest post.
We changed it to calibrate. Now what I'm going to do is click this
and then stand back. It is about a five second countdown to give you time to get back
and step back a little bit, and then I'm going to stand
and put my hands like this kind of in a position
like they're diagonal to the side here, and that's going to properly
calibrate my character. So let's go ahead and give that a try. I'm clicking calibrate and taking a step
back, putting my arms out. And now you'll see
my character looks properly calibrated. And now when I move my hands around
like this, my character is going to be doing the same thing
with my head back and forth. All of that stuff. All right. So that's the basic prep
for setting out for body tracking. Make sure that you are standing up and
that you have calibrated your character. The second thing is to make sure you have
enough room for your arms to move around. So this doesn't mean, you know, they don't have to go all the way up
and all the way down. It's OK if they cut off a little bit. But in general, you once have enough
movement, enough space so your arms are moving
and not getting cut off by the camera. This is going to look a lot worse
if I was closer to the camera like this and moving my arms and then suddenly,
you know, they're going off the screen. They're kind of they're
not in the best position. So what you might want to do
if you're serious about this stuff is that's a terrible angle.
Let's try that again. So you got to keep
adjusting and trying it. Really, every set up
is going to be slightly different, and you just have to test around
and see what works best for you. I have put tape on the ground
for what I feel is like the optimal distance of where I should stand,
and that's a great place to know. OK, here's where I'm going to go when I do my calibration, or here's where
I'm going to stand for all of this stuff. It just helps you out to experiment
with your space. I know some of us have smaller
office spaces to work from. Some have, you know, people behind us that we've got to tell
to move out of the way so you might want to play
around your space and see what works best for you. So that's how you do a torso up character. How would you do a full body character
now like Hopscotch the Frog? Well, basically you want to give
yourself enough space that you can get your full body
in the frame of your camera. So I know when I step back here
that I've got my camera set up in such a way
that I can see my whole body. My feet aren't cut off.
My head isn't cut off. I've got full maneuverability
so I can move around and dance and do whatever crazy stuff I want. So you might have to move
some furniture out of the way. I should probably get rid of that plant,
but that's the basic way to set it up. So I'm going to try this.
So let's turn on the body tracker icon. I'm going to go ahead and click Calibrate,
but it takes several steps back. I'm going to put my arms in a position
and my character is now going to be calibrated. And now my character is not just moving
the arms like in the torso position, but they're also going
to be moving the layers. So now I can do a little dance like this. How back and forth and go over here and my character is going to do the same. So that's it. You just have to make sure
you have enough room that you're not going to knock into anything
and you should be good to go. Now, if you find yourself having a hard
time running back in those five seconds and getting in position, don't worry,
we do have some additional options. So go to your timeline and all the way at the bottom,
there's this body tracker countdown and you can change the default
from five seconds to ten seconds or 20 seconds to give yourself
a little bit of extra time if you need it. Now you have a few additional parameters
that you can fool around with to help fine tune your body tracking
and how your character reacts. The first of those under the body
behavior is if tracking lost and you've got hold in place
or return to rest here . Hold in place is the default, and what this means is if I'm going crazy
and move my arms around and then one, if it goes off of the camera,
what happens to that hand? Well, in this case, it's going to hold in
its last tracks known place. You see, as I'm moving, my hand
is going to be where it was last tracked. And then as soon as it comes back
in, it's going to remember and do the tracking again
until it goes back out. So it's just kind of a safety thing. Now your other option
would be return to rest. This character's default hand
position is out like that. The arms are like that. So in this case, if the tracking was lost,
look what happens. Instead, the arm is going to go back
to that outstretched position instead, because that's what happened in it. As soon as the tracks again,
it's going to go back. So it's too minor, but interesting ways
to deal with, you know, limbs going out of frame and what territory
there will do to try to fix that. If you have return to rest set up, you do
have a return duration gets illuminated and this shows how quick or how slow
that return to rest is going to be. So here I've got my hands tracked. I'm now going to put my hand
out of the camera 12345. It goes back to his wrist position
and then it'll start tracking again. That puts you a little more
control over that. The strength parameter is not one
I would worry too much about. That's basically how much of an influenced body tracking
here has first, the default position. So if I change this to 75
instead of the default 100, well, now my movements
aren't going to be as one to one . It's going to have about 75%
strength on the arms. And so you can try this, but I feel like you just don't
get the same ability as 100%. So personally, I've only
kept this at 100%. So finally, we come to
what I think is the most important part of the body behavior,
and that is the tracking handle section. Anything that is checked here. Means it will be tracked
by your character, so you may be surprised to know
that all their body tracking for told the cat was only three things
being tracked and that's my two wrists, my left and right wrist,
as well as my head movements. Now I could add in the shoulders
and elbows and stuff like that, and that's going to give me
a little bit of extra fidelity. So let me stand back here. Let's calibrate
the character. Try this out. And now not only
is it going to try to track just the risks in the head,
but also my elbow movements , and I also get a little bit of shoulder
shrug, which you can't see that well with this character
because he's got such a big head, but you get the basic idea. You have some additional things
that you can track. But you know, honestly, sometimes
just the wrist in the head, that's enough. And most of our example
characters are set up that way. If the torso characters
where it's only a few things. So it's really going
to depend on the character. So if you're not seeing the full results
or things aren't tracking properly, maybe add a few more more of those checks
and see if adding the shoulder tracking or elbow
tracking helps with things. Or if you're running in Chile,
it feels just 21 to one and you want it to be a little bit
more scaled back. Try reducing the number of check marks
for each character and each environment. It's going to be a different thing. So this is a trial and error experimentation type of thing to see
what works best for you and your puppet. Now, at the time
this recording, there are also a limited number of characters
that have body turning in addition to the body tracking. So you notice with the head turner
behavior that we had in here for a while. As I turn my head, the character is going
to turn its head with me. Well, the star is the unicorn
is also enabled with body training, so the camera is going
to recognize when I turn in. The artist here has provided
different artwork layers to show each body turn position. So again, this only shows up
in a few characters right now, but this is something
that you can take advantage of as well. Sometimes your body tracking
may not be working as expected, and if that's the case, here
are the top five things that I would check to help you out. No one is not having
enough space in the camera, so if you are not properly framed
and things are popping off, you know your head's getting out of the frame,
your hands are getting out the frame. That's just going to create
a lot of issues, and character animator isn't going to be able to keep up,
and it's time to be able to track you because it can't find the different parts. So again, it probably always
makes the best sense to just step. Take a few more steps back
then you think you will need, so you have enough movement, enough area
around you to get correct positioning. Number two is the contrast between
you and your background and lighting. Lighting is huge
if you are in a dark room. I right now I have a window in front of me
and a light over here turned on. That's going to help immensely. So the camera is going to be able to pick up all my different features
as I move around. If it's darker, the camera's
going to struggle a little bit to do the tracking and find out
where is your hand, where are your hips? Where's all that stuff? It becomes more difficult,
so the more well you can be. Typically, the better results
you're going to get. Secondly, if you want to make sure
you have enough contrast between yourself and the background behind you. So if you're wearing an all red shirt
and your background is red, you're going to blend
in, is not going to work as well, is going to have a hard time
doing the tracking. So the more contrast you can have
between yourself in the background, probably the better results
you're going to have. Number three is fighting
with other behaviors, so character animator has a bunch of ways
to control your character, and sometimes those behaviors
don't work well together. That includes four here,
especially the dragger behavior. So check out usually in the past, we've told you, you know,
you drag your hands to move them around. But if I drag my hands and then I try to
do body tracking, look what's happening. The hands are not reacting all the way
like they should be because they're also bringing in the drag
or data that I just did as well. So these two behaviors are fighting the drivers, saying, Hey,
I want to move the hands with the mouse and body tracker saying, Hey, I want to move the hands around with body
tracking and leads to bad results. So my my recommendation is
if you are doing body tracking, you should turn it
the dragger behavior off. Disarm it or completely get rid of it. And then you want to refresh your scene
with the refresh button down here. And that's going to give you
a nice, clean version of your scene to move around with and get rid
of any dragging that you've done previously to make sure
you get the full body tracking. Number four is knowing your puppets,
limits and what they can and can't do. This character is more of a three quarter style character
who's kind of facing to the side, so that means arm movements like this
are going to look good. Whereas if I did my arms like this, that
doesn't look as good as this character. So you want to make sure you know
how your character works and think about their different motions
and what's possible. So for this character,
I might make gestures like this. I might scratch the back of my head. I might do an outstretched
gesture like this. I might pretend to clap
my hands like this. All of those gestures
are going to look pretty good. In general, I found that more big,
deliberate motions tend to work better. So if I just move my hands around like
this and be doing all this sort of stuff that cannot look that great
most of the time. Instead, what you want to do and this is, you know, like most 2D
animation is mostly one post to one post. So I do. These big, deliberate steps are
big actions and motions that I'm doing. And then I'll move to another one
and then I'll do this. And this just tends to look a lot
better to me than just moving your hands and limbs all over the place
unless you're doing dance moves and then you can kind of ,
you know, do whatever you want. But in general, particularly
for our emotions, this sort of pose to pose big interaction
is going to work a lot better and finally play around
with the limb icky behavior. So if you're playing around
with your character and you notice the arms and the elbows aren't quite bending
in the way that you want them to. You can tweak this
with the limb achy behavior. Every character with body tracking should also have them
icky behavior as part of it. We'll get into that
in the reading section. Don't worry about it right now, but
all you really need to know is underway. My cape, there's
this elbow flip threshold. If I play around with this,
I'm going to change. And what position the elbow is bend
one way or the other. So notice now when I'm moving my arms,
the elbows are starting to bend upwards much sooner
than they did before. So now they're starting to bend like
as soon as they go, you know, almost
not a vertical anymore like this. And that's very different from the default
where if I turn this off, if I extend out now, they're kind of,
you know, they start like this. But then they go in and I can do
like my hands on my hips, for example. So you have a lot of options,
what works best for you and what kind of expressiveness
you want your character? So test with your range of motion
snake practice, you know, say, all right, I'm a do my hands like this. I'm going to do this big motion like this. And if the elbows aren't quite working
in the way you want them to play around with that foot threshold,
and that should help out quite a lot. Right. So for the rest of this video,
I'm going to be really focused on these three example file characters
that I've put together for you. Very simple setups. And so there's four of them. There is this frontal facing
torso up character, a three quarter view facing character,
a full body, front facing character, and a three quarter
view full body character as well. These are probably the most lightweight
and simple examples of body tracking, and so if you're on an older machine
and some of these newer puppets with a lot of triggers and stuff
are running slow, these characters might be your best bet for something
that works pretty fluidly and fast. In addition, there's a worksheet
that goes through this a PDF that talks a little bit
more about the rigging process. We're going to get into that
a little later in the video, but this whole package is available
on the body tracking website, and you can download these free characters
do whatever you want with them, edit them, put extra stuff on top of them,
or use them to learn how to make your own creations. All right, so you've got a body track character, and now you want
to start recording something you think. Everything seems to be working
well and you're ready to go. Well, as long as your body
behavior is armed and the body icon is turned
on, you're ready to record. Just make sure your front of your timeline and go ahead and click
that red record button. So let's go ahead
and do like a little dance here. Something like this. Just something ridiculous and goofy. Just having a good time. All right, something like that.
All right, so that recorded some data. My timeline was played
back. Take look and yeah, there's my little dance moves
and it's looking as good as my. My day or lack of dance skills will allow. But there you go. It's
all recorded here in the timeline. So let's take a closer
look at the timeline. What's happening here? I see that I've got, you know, my age
is my face, but then I also have body. And if three tracks that were recorded
here, I've got my head, my left wrist and my right wrist.
Why were these 23 that were recorded? Well, that's because they were the three
that were checked over here as being tracked
in the body behavior. So you can think of it this way. Anything that is checked over here is
what's going to show up as recorded data. So if I also had the shoulders,
check the hips, checked all that stuff. I would just have more lines
and that just makes it a little bit easier to do some editing. So you don't have to do
a whole performance over again. If this was just one body track and you just messed up
with one arm movement, that went crazy. It would be pretty bad to have to go
and rerecord everything. Luckily, you can kind of isolate
individual elements and then fine tune your performance
with a few additional recordings. So let's do a fix as an example, let's say
as I'm dancing, I like this first part. That's great, but
then I start to get these flabby arms and it's just not looking great. I wish my left arm was just kind of
holding out and doing something different. So what I meant to do
is put it right where that starts to begin and what I'm going to do is
I only want to record really my left hand moving around on my left
wrist for this character. So what I'm going to do
is uncheck the right wrist and the head because I already have data for those. I don't want to record more data
for them to overwrite it. All I want to do is work on my left
wrist performance. OK, so now with body tracking turned
on, you'll see what's happening. Only this arm, this wrist
is being tracked right now. This one is not now. The face is still moving and the eyes are
still moving because I have all those on. Probably for a fix like this, I'm
going to want to turn all that stuff off. So I'm just going to hold down command and click on the red dots
to turn everything off and then turn on body just so that's
the only one that's recording. And now this is the only movement
that I'm going to do. So let's say instead of the flat penis,
I'm just going to keep my arm like raised and kind of do a raise
the roof type thing here. So let's go ahead. Click Record. And I'll just do
this general movement like this. And that's good. All right, so what did that do
that recorded a new take over top of my existing
take for the left wrist? So it's very choppy here
where it switches. Of course I've got blend handles. I can just click and drag these blend handles to blend
one performance into the next, and then it should seamlessly kind of transition
from one arm position to the next. Now, I'm not seeing the rest of the arm
movement happening, and that's because I've checked the
the additional handles that I recorded. So to view handles, to view the tracking
and to record it. You need to have things checked
so they check these things back on. Now, when I play it back,
I should see the whole thing as it was originally supposed to be.
And there you go. I would not call
that much of an improvement, but it's hopefully proving the point of
the flexibility of what's going on here. So I'm showing a torso character here,
but you know, a full body character, you could do the exact same thing. Let's say you're dancing and suddenly one
leg, you know, kind of goes crazy or off, or you really want to accentuate
a certain part of the animation. So this is the way that I do
any professional type recording. If I'm just goofing around and I'm just dancing
and having a good time or doing a live stream or something
like that, I don't care about that stuff. I'm just going to press record,
have everything on and go. But if I'm trying to really,
you know, work on a particular timing and getting things looking as good
as possible, I'm going to go this route. I'm going to record one pass. That's as best as I can do
with the body tracking and then layer on these small fixes
and parts to help bring it to life. Another quick tip another reason
you probably want to record your body separately from face. An eye gaze is you're going
to get more accurate face tracking data when you're closer to the camera, right? So here I'm getting my eyebrow movements
and my pupil movements and all. That's looking great. Now that changes a little bit
when I start to, you know, move back, let's just calibrate. So now it's doing a pretty good job. I'm a little bit further back,
but my face is a fraction of the size that it was before. And so the camera's going to have
a slightly harder time picking up all the nuances of my eyebrows
and my pupils and stuff like that. At this range, though, it's
pretty good. It's OK, you could get by. But if I go all the way back here
and move back to the back, if I was to mean like a full body
character or something like that. Well, now I'm moving
my pupils around my eyebrows and it's doing a little bit of it. It's doing a pretty good job,
but it's not going to be as accurate as if I was right up next to the camera
and getting all that tracking data. So just a quick tip. If you're not getting accurate results
for eyebrows, pupils, that sort of thing do that face
and I guess take separately. And you should get much better results. So example characters
are fun to play around with in all. But if you're an illustrator, artist and you really want to make
your own characters and add body tracking, there's a little bit of extra rigging
that you have to do in there. So this next section
is going to go into that. So we're going to use those example files
that he talked about earlier. Free link at the video description below
and at the bottom of the screen here. And make sure you download those
and you can follow along with me and we can rig some of
these characters together. So if you've opened up this project file
that's included in there, you'll see a bunch of different things
and the puppets in scenes. These are the ones that are
completely rigged and ready to go. But you notice there's a section
called Unwrapped here, and this includes a bunch of versions
that I just imported. These were all made in Adobe Illustrator. I just imported the illustrator files
didn't do any rigging whatsoever to them. Just add them to a scene. And so I'm going to walk step by step now how to add body
tracking to each of these characters. So let's start with this one.
The example front torso. It's the second one listed here. This is just a simple,
straight on character. There should be really easy to set up, so I'm going to go ahead and double
click on the puppet example frank torso. And that's going to take me into rig mode. All right, I'm going to do my basic
things that I do with almost every puppet. When I first bring it
in, I'm going to select the body and using the fixed
tool down here, the little pin tool. I'm going to select this and make a few pin points
to keep the body fixed to the ground. That's what I want
for this particular character. I wouldn't want to do that if I had legs,
but because it's a torso character, I want the twist to kind of
stay fixed down there. second, I'm going to select the head
and I'm going to drag the head origin here to the neck
because our heads pivot from our neck. They don't pay it from our nose. So
that's just going to look slightly better. third, you don't have to do this,
but I'm going to do this. I don't like it when the dagger fights
with the body tracking. So I'm going to go over, select
my top level care puppet group here. I'm going to go over to dragger, click the menu icon next to it
and say, remove behavior. That way, I won't be tempted
to accidentally drag and have that behavior
competing with my body tracking data, but we're not done with behaviors yet. Now that I'm here, I actually want to add
two additional behaviors to my character, and that is by clicking the Plus button. Here I'm going to add
the body behavior, and I'm also going to add the limb ikee behavior. These two go hand-in-hand. You should always see body and limb. Together to make sure you've added
both of those with out of the way now I can get into tagging
the different parts of my character. So really, what the body behavior Photoshop character, I'm really caring
about my arms and tagging them. So let's go ahead to my left arm. By default, the origin is
here in the middle. I want to drag that and move it
to where it would connect to the body. In this case, the shoulder right here
and something like that looks good now. My arm is going to rotate
from the shoulder and said the elbow,
and that's going to look a lot better. Then I'll go down here
to the handle tool or click that and I will add a handle
right here for the elbow, and I'm going to go ahead and tag
that as the left elbow. And then I'm going to go down here
and put right around where the hand would be
and tag that as the left wrist. Then I will use the stick tool down here,
this little bracket looking thing, and I'm going to click
and drag where I think the bones would be. So I'll click and drag here and let go. Leave some room for the elbow
and click and drag here. Like that? OK, that's making the left arm
look pretty good. Now we're not going to tag
the shoulder here. We actually are going to tag
the shoulder on the body. That's just going to work better overall and lead to less issues
with the body tracking setup. So let's leave that for now. Let's move on to the right arm
and do the exact same thing. OK, I'm going to click and drag to get
the origin of the right arm up here. Then I'm going to go back to my handle
tool and then click here for the elbow. Tag that as the right elbow and down here, tag
this as the right wrist. Then again, I'll go to my stick tool,
click and drag, make a stick there. Leave a little room for the elbow,
click and drag. And here we go. All right now, that's done less. Select the body group
and you'll see where these green dots are. That is where my my attachment points are, and that's a great guide
for me to put my shoulder tags. So let's go back to the handle tool here,
and I'm going to put it right over top of this, my right arm. Remember to tag that
as the right shoulder, and then I'm going to go over the left
one and tag that as the left shoulder. And now they are going to be
well connected to the rest of the body and it will help
with any shoulder tracking. I want to do the final part. We want to tag of a torso up
character is the neck. Now, in the past,
we have told you when the head, you also want to tag this as a neck
for best results with body tracking. That's actually not the case. What we find gets the best results
is if you go to your body group, zoom in a little bit and you're going to want
to put it between the two shoulder blades. That's going to give you the best shoulder shrugging ability
and just give you better neck stretching. If this character had a neck,
which he really doesn't, but you just you're going to get better results
overall over a wider variety of puppets. So I'm going to go ahead in the middle
of these two shoulder blades. Put a handle there,
and I'm going to tag that as the neck. And now my puppet is in pretty good shape. All right. So since this is my example,
front torso character, let's find the corresponding scene for it
and I'm going to go click on this one right here. And there we go. So now I come in and the body tracking
is working as expected. So as I move my hands around,
as I move my head, my character is going
to be doing the same. Now I probably want to tweak a few things. For example, the character's looking a little small,
so I'll probably scale it up a little bit. Move it down position y
so its torso is off like that. The face, as you see, is scaling in
and out and looking pretty weird. So I probably want to change head scale
strength to zero, something like that. So, yeah, I like how
this is looking overall. I can, of course,
dig into the body behavior and do a little bit
more tweaking if I wanted to. If I want to track additional things
like my elbows or shoulders neck, I can do that, but by default is
just doing the head and the wrist. And honestly, that's looking pretty good to me, so I'm pretty happy
with how this is looking so far. Now, depending on how your arms
are connected to your character, you may want some different attach styles. So see when I start to bend my arm here,
see how it's kind of bunching up there in the shoulder. You can get some weird bends
there, depending on your attach style. Right now, I have this character
set to a, well, detached style, but let's go back to RIC mode. And now if I select my arm
instead of weld, change this to Hinge, and let's do that
for both the left arm and the right arm. And now I'm not going to get any of that
bunching happening anymore. It's more like it's pivoting like a propeller blade or something
like that, moving back and forth. In general, I found that hinge,
at least for the types of characters I make, works a little bit better
for the body tracking, but I tested out. Your mileage may vary depending on what
type of puppet style you've got going on. So that's the basics of rigging
a torso Adobe character. Let's move over to a full body character
and see what that might look like. So I'm going to go to the front body
character here, and I'm going to just double click on the scene
first to see how it's looking in general. And it's a little big for the scene. So let's bring the scale down slightly here and the transform behavior,
something like that looks pretty good. But again, this is a completely
unreached puppet. I haven't added any Reagan information, so I'm going to go into my example
front body here. Double click that. All right, so let's do
some of the same things that I did before. I'm not going to add fixed
handles to the body because I don't want the feet to be pinned to the ground. I want to be able to move them,
but I am going to take my head and drag that origin down to the next
where it pivots from there. I'm also going to select
my top level puppet here. I'm going to remove the drag
or behavior like that, and I'm going to click
Plus and go to body and also limb. A case of both of those are added now. Next up, let's move to rigging,
so I'm going to go through everything just like before.
So let's start with the left arm. I'm going to drag the origin
here to the shoulder. I'm going to put an elbow here. Tag it and a left wrist here and tag it and go ahead and
add those sticks like that actually can get. Let's move on to the right arm. I will again take the origin,
put it around the shoulder area. Do a tag a handle here. Tag it as a right elbow. Another handle here. And tag it as a right wrist and the exact same sticks treatment
as I did with the other one. All right, let's move to the body
now, just so I can add my shoulders and my neck, so I'm going to actually
have the neck first right here in between. And I'm going to do that for the neck. Then I'm going to go here
over this green dot where I know the left arm is connected
and do left shoulder there. And then do the right one here as well. While I'm at it, I'm going to shift select
both of these arms and change these from the weld attach style to the hinge attach style,
which should work slightly better. I said this point we've done everything
the exact same as the torso up character, but now we have the legs to worry about,
so let's move on to them. Let's take the left leg here. And just like the arm, I'm going to drag the origin
so it connects to the body right here. And now I'm going to start adding my additional handles,
so I'm going to do one for the knee here. Tag that is, knee ankles are not actually tracked
by the body tracker, so you can just ignore ankles for now
instead, almost directly under the knee. I'm going to go here and do my heel and tag this one as a heel,
so I'm skipping the ankle. I'm just moving to the heel and then I'm
going to zoom in a little bit. So I get a little bit of extra room
and I'm going to select my last and my last handle and tagged as the toe. Then I'll use my stick
and put a stick here for the foot, a stick up for the heel and the knee, and stick between the knee and the hip, which we will be tagging on the body group
just like we did with the shoulders. So very similar set up to the arms
just extended to the legs. Let's do the same thing here
with the right leg. Again, I am dragging
the origin of the right leg up here. I'm going to add my knee and tag
that as a right knee. Skip the ankle, move down to the heel
directly under it, tag that as a heel and then tag this last one by the toe
as the right toe. And finally, I will add these sticks
for where the foot is, where the bottom part of the leg is that looks a little off
with stretched out again. You know, slight variations
will have an effect on your movement. So if you see your
knees bending and weird ways that you wouldn't expect, try changing the placement of where
your knees are versus your heel versus your toe versus your hip,
and you might see pretty dramatic changes. So it is something you can kind of play around with and tweak
to get everything just right. OK, so remember what we did
with the top part of the body where we have the shoulders
and the neck between? We do the same exact thing with the hips
and the waist down below. So I'm going to start here where the neck
was basically right in the middle here. I'm going to tag this as my waist, and then I'm going to move here
to where the left leg connects and tag that at at a handle
there and tag that as my left hip. And finally, and the tag, this last one
put a handle there and tag it as my right hip. All right. So I think this character
is looking pretty good. Let's go check it out in record mode. So again, I'm doing example
front body, so let's double click on the example front body
seen here in the unreached folder. All right. So when I come into my scene,
I can see my character's already starting to do some movement, but I need
to do a little bit of extra tracking. By default, the body behavior here
is only going to track your head and your two wrists.
That's what it gives you by default. But since we are full body,
we actually want to do a few more. So I'm going to tag three more things. first, I'm going to tag the heels,
the right heel and the left heel because those are going
to track my feet, basically. And then I also want to have
something in the middle to track. So I found that the waist
is the best thing to track there. Now you can also track the knees,
the hips, other things if you want to. But this to me, has been a really great
combo that is kind of the bare minimum. It gets great body tracking
without having to have so many tracks in your timeline for recording,
so play around with it. See what works best for your character.
For me, this is looking pretty good. So let's go back like this
and I'll do some calibration here. Click Calibrate. Take several steps back in my whole body into the frame, and
there we go now. Not only am I doing the hand tracking,
but I'm also doing the foot tracking as well so I can do crazy dance
just like this back and forth and my character is going to do the same. So pretty easy, right? Just basic tagging of a character,
just like you've had to do with walk or live it in the past. But now you're just adding
the body behavior and tracking a few additional handles
and works pretty great. one last thing for full body characters,
I would highly recommend going into your limit achy behavior
and turning off initial foot pain. Sometimes body tracking can fight
with that initial foot pain that basically is keeping your feet stuck to the ground
when your character first starts off and you may want to have a little bit
more movement of your feet. And I find it, it's
sometimes those to fight with each other. So just as a precaution,
I would recommend checking it off. Try it out and see
what works best for you. So depending on what type of character
you're creating, I would just go through the different puppeteer
and use these as a guide, as an example. So if I have a front facing four body
character, this is the way I want to go front facing torso character,
this is the way I want to go now. I didn't get into the quarter examples,
but they're very similar to the two different versions. The only difference is
they have a slight tilt to them and typically a three quarter character is going to be a little bit more versatile
in terms of being able to, you know, face other characters
or feel like their face in the screen. So typically, I've been making a lot more
three quarter style characters, and just the thing to think about here is, you know which limbs are going to go
in front of which other parts. So for example, for this one,
I had the left arm actually in front of the head and everything else
because I want that to kind of go in front of everything. So when I move my left arm up, it's
going to go in front of my face so I can pretend like I'm scratching my nose
or rubbing my chin or something like that. Then I move into the head and in the body. I had them layered a very specific way. I have my left leg
kind of in the front here. I have my pants and torso behind that. And then the leg, the other leg,
the right leg is behind all that. So it's going to look like it's behind. It's really selling that effect of this
three quarter view. And then finally, I had the arm behind
all that because if I had my arm go down, I don't want it to look like
it's in front of this leg. I want to look like it's behind. So you think about
how your character set up and how you want these different limbs
and parts to happen now, you know, for the front
facing character. You know, I had the arms
here, left arm in right arm, but there's no reason you couldn't again
have these above the head group if you wanted these
to show up in front of your head. Similarly, you know,
if you want them to show up behind, I could drag them to show up
behind my shirt. And all of that as well. So really think about the placement
and the full mobility of what what you want your character to be able to do. Now, for those of you that are interested in the body
turning as well, this is going to be
a little bit more advanced, but it is going to give your character
a lot of additional flexibility. So the main working example we're showing here for this is Stardust
the unicorn available on the homepage. And if you look at his body group here,
he has three things inside of it a frontal view, a left corner view
and a right corner view. And inside each of these is its own collection of arms and legs
and all of that stuff. So what they did is here on the body
group, you'll see that a behavior has been added and that behavior
is the head and body turner. This used to be just called
the head turner behavior. But now we've also added body and I think
by default it's set to head rotation. You would want to select this
as body rotation if you do indeed have it on the body group
and want to move between them. And then you'll see your different
tagged views here. So I know here I see a one next to it,
so I know quarter frontal and the right quarter. These are all going to look now. I could also add profile views
if I wanted to as well. I would not recommend
doing upward and downward. I don't think that works,
but you could have up to five different turn views for your character
if you wanted it. And then you would just
the character's going to switch between those as you
turn your body in the webcam. So it's a lot of additional
friggin work, for sure. You've got to make all these different views, but it does lead to some
pretty cool results for your character. It's also up to you how much of
your character turns with these. So with this character, you know, his feet kind of stay stationary
planted to the ground, and the torso is the main part that's moving as opposed
to the feet moving at the same time. And that kind of gives it
a better, more grounded look. Personally, I think that's going to work
best for your character instead, their feet
kind of floating all over the place. But again, you can play around with it
and see what works best for you. And now we're going to get really nerdy and advanced
so you can completely skip over this part. If you're not, don't
want to get too deep in the weeds. But one last thing is the, you know, I've told you so far, you
don't want to have the dragger behavior and the body behavior together at the same time
because they can fight with each other. But check out Hopscotch the Frog. He actually has this awesome jump trigger
where he does have body tracking enabled if I turned it on. But if I press X,
he'll go jumping off the screen like that, and that would completely fight
with the body tracker. Because look, it's all if you look at the timeline, it's a really complicated
set up of all these different draggers, of all his different limbs, you know, being moved around
and pulled in different ways. That would look terrible with the body tracker on usually,
but there's a trick to this. The very first thing
that's recorded here is body strength. And if you remember earlier on,
I told you with the body behavior, there's this strength parameter
that you probably shouldn't touch at all. But here's the exception what you can do is set a strength key frame for 0%. Bring it over here and say, OK,
I want to add an extra key frame here and now I can select these,
right click them and let's create a take from key frames I can press command be to blend them. Let's get rid of this old take,
and I can even get rid of the key frames. And now you'll see what's. Happening is the body tracker behavior is basically going
to zero strength, so it's saying don't do body tracking anymore
and let this other stuff take over. That's how you get around body
tracking and mixing it with pre-made animations
that you can do with the dragger. If you fold over all of that,
congratulations, you're a character,
animator, expert and pro. I just want to throw it out there
because there's a lot of little tricks like this out there
that you can play around with , and I'm never going to be able
to cover everything in this video. But the body tracker
can be the start of a lot of really cool things, so play around with it
and combine it with other, you know, triggers, behaviors and things
and see what you can come up with. All right, that's it. That is body tracking. We are so excited
to see what everyone creates with this. So please use hashtag
character animator when sharing your creations on social media
so we can check them out. And if you run into any problems
with bringing your own characters or any of the calibration, setup
or recording editing anything like that, the best place to get help
is the official character animator forums. That's it for today. Thank you so much
for watching and have fun.
amazing!!!
So excited to try it!