Character Animator New Features (Part 1: Triggers & Controls Panel)

[Music] hey this is Dave from the W character animator team and today I am extremely excited to announce the latest release of Adobe character animator CC is out you can download it right now and there is so much packed in this release that we've divided it into two separate tutorial videos and this first one is a deep dive into the new triggers system so how to convert your existing puppet into the new system what's the difference between triggers and swap sets and all that stuff and a new visual controls panel and how to customize that to give your characters custom visual control there is a lot here so let's get started the single biggest change in this release is the completely reworked trigger system so triggers are the way that you show or hide particular artwork or behaviors or groups by pressing an alphanumeric key in the past so for example if I press the G key I want these glasses to appear or disappear and this was done in the past by when you import a character they automatically got this thing called keyboard triggers a behavior that basically runs the show for pressing triggers but you'll notice now in this latest release this says obsolete and that's because there is a new behavior called just called triggers that is going to run everything from here on out and moving forward so what you're going to want to do with any existing puppets that you have is bring them into the new version and then go to puppet convert obsolete to trigger keys once you select that is going to go through this conversion process and a few things are going to happen number one that keyboard trigger obsolete behavior is going to disappear and now you'll see this new triggers behavior over here showing up and so that's kind of the brains behind the trigger system from here on out so you won't be seeing keyboard triggers anymore and in fact if you go to something like glasses and go down here you'll notice that properties of a keyboard trigger say obsolete as well so once you've converted if you add things down here like 6 or hide others in group or some of the stuff you used to have to do it's not going to work anymore because it doesn't have the underlying keyboard triggers old behavior running it but that's okay because hopefully this new system is going to make things a little bit easier so we're gonna walk through how to consolidate and make sense of all this in a little bit but let's start with a simpler version of this character where I haven't added any triggers whatsoever let's say I just imported this PSD into this version and I want to start from scratch and I want to start with the glasses so there's this one layer glasses that when I turn it on I want glasses to show so there's four different ways I could actually add this as a trigger so first you've got your triggers panel down here in the lower left corner and this shows up in rig mode this is tabbed with the history up panel so you can see all your changes you've ever made and it says here drop layers here to create triggers so that is the first way to create a trigger you take your layer you drag it into your triggers panel and it shows up here and it says glasses and you'll notice the little keyboard icon that used to be over here in the right-hand corner is now down here and so I can just click it type G and then that means when I press the G key glasses are going to show up alright so that's the first way to do it let's click this and delete it what's another way well here where that keyboard column used to be you'll notice there is a little trigger icon the little finger pressing the button and if I go down over top of this you'll see a little plus icon appear so if I click this it says create trigger or create swap set which we'll get to in a second that's disabled for now because this isn't a group but I'm just going to go to click create trigger and the exact same thing happens it shows up down here as a trigger I can type in G and that is going to do the same thing when I press the G key glasses are going to appear alright another way to do it is you've got this little plus symbol here in the triggers panelist says add an empty trigger swap set I can click on that create trigger that's just going to create this blank trigger group I could click this and press Enter and call it whatever I want let's call this glasses too and then I can just drag this layer over top of an existing trigger and it's going to be added and you can tell that a layer is added down here at the bottom where it says layers and I can see Cassandra head glasses I can see the path of what is here and so notice glasses two and glass both have the same layer associated with them and that's a really powerful concept as the new trigger system you could drag as many layers as many times into as many triggers as you want so instead of being limited to just this key for just this trigger like the old system now you have a lot more flexibility so if I wanted this glass is to be done with H or something like that I have the ability to do that now this can be expanded to other things so for example in the body group I have this red monster shirt that she can also wear that she can change into and so if I wanted this to also be triggered by the glasses I could just drag this over top of glasses and it's going to show up down here so you'll see both the head glasses and the body shirt - we'll both be triggered by the G key so let's test that out but going to record mode and so I've got Cassandra here and if I press G now both are showing up the red monster shirt and the glasses and if I let go they go back now the thing I said to H that's just going to show the glasses so you can start to get a sense of okay I can add as many layers or groups or whatever as I want to individual keys or triggers the very last way to add triggers is by right-clicking any layer or group so if I go to glasses and go down here to create trigger it's going to create yet another trigger for the glasses no notice there's also this add to trigger and that would allow me to add it as a layer to an existing trigger that's already there instead of creating a new one so the latch parameter that used to be over in the right hand properties is now down here and it says latch and if I click on that notice the the background of the key turns a little bit darker let's see here in record mode so when I press G it's going to stick in that position it's gonna be latched into that on show position and then when I press it again it's going to hide again instead of me having to hold and press it down if a layer in your puppet has been added to a trigger you'll see this little hand icon show up in the right side if you hover over it it will show you what those triggers are if any and if you click on it it's going to highlight in the triggers panel the trigger that it's associated with now for this one this was added into three different triggers and no notice that gets a little arrow icon that shows up next to it and so if I hover over it it'll show me the different triggers that's associated with and then if I click on it it will also allow me to select the right one and then that will be highlighted over in the triggers panel so it's a little easier to understand you know where okay this was used for three different triggers this was used for just one trigger hopefully it makes the understanding the relationship between these two columns a little bit easier but now we come to an instance like the hands and in this case this character has multiple hand positions they've got a hand like this a palm flip a point a thumbs up they have you know a bunch of different hand positions and in this case I only want one of these triggers to show up at a time and so we've added this thing called swap sets and swap sets are special triggers where only one will show up at any given time and the same rules apply to these triggers as the other triggers so if I wanted my hand group to be a swap set if I just click over here I have this new option called create swap set and that will do it as well as just dragging the whole group in here so swap set looks a little different it's got this little icon here and I can't roll it up or down and then I've got all my different possible swapped artwork pieces inside of it and whichever icon is filled in so that could be thumbs up that could be point that could be whatever that is going to be the default trigger that's gonna be the first thing that shows up in this group okay and I don't need a default you could take it off if you wanted to but I think in most cases people are going to want some sort of default position so my recommendation would be don't add a trigger a key for your default trigger but for all your others that you want to swap to you would want to add keys to that so I'm just gonna click in here and do one two and so on and so this tells character animator all right start with hand one and then when I press the 1 key showed this hand instead and hide this one this was previously done by that hi to others in group checkbox that was a little obtuse and hard to explain and so this makes it a little bit clearer you know you had this group and you can see all the different things that could be swapped in and out so let's test this out in record mode alright so she's got her hand here and the one that's showing up by default is the one that I marked as default by clicking on that little hand icon and then if I press one it's going to swap in that next one if I let go it's gonna go back to the default two three four five and six all her different hand positions are showing up and only one is showing up at a time this makes a lot of sense for things where you want to show only one at a time like hands like different eyelid positions like different eyebrows States groups where you have multiple states that you want to swap in and out of something the best solution moving forward is going to be creating a swap set for them now a trigger system is pretty flexible so here I've got my glasses and let's say I wanted to get rid of this shirt layer so I click the little X next to it and now gee this glasses trigger is only going to do the glasses but let's say later I decide that was a mistake and I've got this other trigger down here shirt two that I want to show up as well if I drag this trigger on top of another trigger an existing trigger it will basically merge the two and incorporate the layers from the thing I was dragging in to the trigger that I already created and I found that merging very helpful for making my converted old Puppets feel a lot cleaner in the triggers panel a lot easier to understand so in the past I'd these eyebrow groups for Cassandra she had a default her neutral eyes and then eyebrows and then worried and angry states one in two triggered those and they did the exact same thing for the right eye brow worried and angry one and two well I don't actually need to separate swap sets anymore I could just make this an eyebrow group so I'm just gonna call this eyebrows and let's just call this default and I'm just going to drag the default from the right eyebrow and the worried from the right eyebrow and they angry from the right eyebrow into the left eyebrow group and now default is going to be both the right and left eyebrow neutral States same with worry it's going to be both right and left eyebrow so you can see this makes it a lot cleaner you're not hunting through your layer panel to see oh yeah where did I add that trigger or what's this set to hide others and groove or anything like that it's a lot easier and more manageable to have all your triggers in one place down here now the way the new trigger system works may require a little bit of surgery on existing characters to get working right and that means going into the actual PSD or AI file to change the structure of some of these where your artwork lives so for example this old character dude used to have this yellow mouth that showed up here when I press the two key it shows up and it's in the same group as all the other mouth shapes that automatically show up when you lip-sync okay so let's go to record mode here and let's see what happens when I press the two key okay nothing okay now it's showing up but then if I smile it goes away so what's happening here is the lip sync behavior the mouth is overriding the trigger of the yell and that's because I have it in the same group as these other things that are getting triggered by the lip sync so basically what's happening here is I'm running into trouble because I've got the yell inside a group that has other things that could be triggered by my voice by audio and this also applies to other things like blinks head turns cycle layers other behaviors that could be triggered by certain things happening or events taking place and so if you put your triggered thing in the same group as those things and those get triggered by something else those are going to overwrite or supersede what you've got over here so let's take a look at a fixed version of this guy and in this case I made a separate folder outside of the mouth group where I added my alternate mouth shapes so the yell and a knock out mouth are both showing up out here and because of that because they're not in the same group as this thing that's going to get triggered by the audio they're safe and they're going to override whatever else I have showing up here but I have to set it up as a swap set basically saying okay by default I normally want the mouth to show up but then when I press yell I only want that to show up and I want to hide the mouth and the way I set that up down here you'll see I've got a mouth swab set group and the default is going to be the whole mouth group so basically I just took the mouth group and dragged it over top of default and it gets added as the default meaning by default if I talk it's going to do the normal lip-sync but then when I do knock out or yell it's gonna only show those layers and instead hide the rest of the mouth so you kind of see how you set these sort of things up swap sets can be really powerful and hide whole groups or whole instances of things inside a character and it's gonna take a little experimentation to find out what works best for your particular character but all of the example characters that we have up on the Adobe site and on the ok samurai puppets page all have been converted to the latest trigger system and so if there's something you're struggling with there's probably an example character out there that will be able to help you understand how these are coming together and how to solve whatever potential issues you're having now one of the biggest benefits of the new trigger system is how the triggers show up in the timeline for recorded performances so remember in the past you may have recorded a trigger for the keiki or something like that and the time that just shows K and a long block down there and you're like wait what was that for what was K triggering again you had to remember and kind of do some mental gymnastics to remember how you would set everything up so it's a lot easier in the new version I'll show you what it means so let's press record and this character has you know four different eye positions and the glasses that appear and disappear and then if I bring her hand up here I've got a few different hand positions like the thumbs or like that or a point or other things like that and go back to default okay so now if i zoom in here a little bit notice I've got a triggers section that says glasses eyes and right hand and notice I've got takes for glasses and pressed eyes happy eyes and then all my different hand positions and the names that I said in the triggers panel are all showing up down here making it a lot clearer when things begin and end so for the triggers for example if I'm editing this I'm probably going to turn triggers off I'm probably going to disarm the triggers behavior so I can actually see everything happening so for the glasses for example that was a very simple trigger and I can see when glasses shows up that's when it begins and ends so you edit these exactly like you do the lip sync up above when you're doing the different mouth shapes you can just select and drag over the in or the out point and just change where that particular trigger begins or ends or you could just drag select both of the the in and the out point and drag to change the positioning of that without changing the duration now for swap sets like the right hand notice when the default is showing up there's nothing there default is not going to show up as a bar but when you move into one of these other hand positions it will show them and then you'll go back to the default so whatever you have set as default is going to show up as blank space in the timeline and all those other swap positions then will show up as individual bars down here so this makes timeline editing that triggers a lot easier it's much more clear much easier to get that precision timing just right and it to me it's one of the best benefits of the new trigger system now there's another new panel that's complementary to the triggers panel and that's the new controls panel and you can find that in record or stream mode so in record mode its tabbed with the timeline over here and if you clip controls you'll see this thing that says perform or layout and it says generate controls for your puppets name same thing in stream mode if I go over here I can see perform layout generate controls so let's see what happens when I press generate controls so 22 triggers added to layout and now I have this visual system of all the different triggers that I have set up in rig mode associated with this puppet so instead of remembering the four does this to the eyes or six does glasses or whatever I can just click on them right here and it's a nice visual way to control your character now the nice thing is this system is fully customizable so if I click on to layout over here everything gets a dotted line and I can move these things around and rearrange them however I want I can even delete triggers that I don't need for example a lot of times in your upsets your defaults will show up but if you don't have a key assigned to them maybe you don't want those to show up they'll just show up when you stop showing an another swapped artwork piece so I can just delete any of those if I wanted to it's your choice though and then it can organize these however I want there's some nice little snapping that's involved a lot of really nice things you can do so that's looking pretty good now I can also right click any of these to get a few different options so if I want kind of a lighter background for them if they're not showing up very well like these eyebrows don't show up very well on the dark background so I might choose light instead to make them show up a little bit easier I can also change the keys here as well so if I didn't want to to show up here I could do a few things I could either right click and go to remove trigger key and that's going to remove that key binding to it or if I have it selected and I press a letter like F then that is going to be the new trigger key for it so the default the artwork is auto-generated by what the trigger system is seen and I could hide some of these you know layers to make this look a little cleaner if I wanted to I also have the ability if there's multiple layers or groups associated with the trigger to right-click it and change this is really subtle for these eyes but you'll notice I can change which artwork it's pulling from to show that little thumbnail image which is a nice little a customization touch but perhaps the coolest part about the controls panel is it allows you to customize things even further with some behavior parameters so if you go into layout mode notice as soon as you go into layout mode that some things in your behaviors over here get some dotted lines around them as well and if they have that that means they can be dragged into your controls panel to serve as additional controls for your character so in the transform behavior for example for Cassandra here I could drag in position X and rotation and opacity so now if I go back to perform mode and make sure that my character is selected over here then look what happens when I drag position X she moves back and forth on and off the screen a pasady slider she disappears and reappears moved she rotates so you create basically this custom control board for your character doing all sorts of different things that you may want them to do and this makes character mobility and flexibility a lot easier and the nice thing is I can change the parameters down here the min and Max value of each of these so position X by default this was 900 and negative 900 if I only wanted her to move a little bit I could click on this and change this to you know 250 and negative 250 instead and now notice when I go to perform and move the slider she's only moving a little bit back and forth not on and off the screen no better yeah when you save your puppet when you export your puppet by going to file export puppet that's going to create a dot puppet file to share with other people not only is the original master artwork your PSD or ai file plus the rigging you've added can character animator going to be included in that file but also this custom controls panel is going to show up as well so you can create a ready-to-go puppet share it with someone else and they will have all these controls and features and be ready to go for a live stream or recorded performance have a little refresh icon down here in the corner click on that and that's going to look for any more triggers that you've added to your character so if you're working on it and adding some more stuff it's going to find those and add them here but now if I'm resizing my panel and things getting a little messy I can also press alt and click on PC or option click on Mac and that's gonna reflow everything snapped into kind of a nice left left aligned organized way and that's helpful particularly when you're moving between modes if you went to record mode for example and you might want to rearrange things just press option click and that's going to make things fit within whatever size of that controls panel that you have another great addition is the ability to control these triggers with an external MIDI device so I've gotten a laptop here hooked up to a MIDI enabled keyboard and if I go into layout mode here so let's go to layout and select the glasses trigger then with that selected if I went and clicked like this G key here and so that turns this green and tells you that the G key is what is controlling this and if I press another key it's gonna switch that or this and as I go up in the octaves it's going to you know change the numbers as well so that's great very easy to hook up to a specific key so if you had a keyboard or another type of MIDI device for little pictures on it or something like that you could hook it up to one of these your puppet MIDI also works with sliders and this is where it really gets interesting so if I select a slider here opacity and with it selected and layout mode I'm just going to move this little modulation wheel slightly and doing that is going to add in this opacity control now so now when I move this slider this little wheel up and down she's going to turn invisible and notice that the opacity slider is moving up and down as well if you want to get really crazy you can connect several of these controls to a single MIDI control so I'll show you what I mean I've got my position x scale rotation and opacity I'm going to select them all and then with all them selected I'm just gonna move this mod wheel again and now look what happens all of them are connected and when I move the wheel now she's doing all four of those things at once so we're gonna see a lot of really cool systems in the future I think with people hooking up whole facial expressions to sliders and that sort of stuff well they'll certainly be some more tips and tricks about this in the future but this is a quick overview of some of the possibilities of MIDI control now one word of warning when using these in record mode to have these show up when recording you have to make sure that that behavior is armed tour that parameter is armed within the the properties panel so if I want these triggers to show up in as I was showing earlier in the timeline I need to make sure the triggers behavior is armed it has a red dot next to it now by default that's how it looks so that's probably gonna be fine but for some of these custom controls position X for example is not armed by default it shows up down here and it has a little circle next to it but by default it doesn't have a red dot next to it so if I recorded a performance for example let's press record and I just do position X back and forth like a little bit and then press record again to stop it let's look at the timeline and position X is not showing up and that's because it wasn't armed for recording so if I want to record those I need to make sure they're armed so I want position X rotation opacity I will arm position X rotation and opacity and now let's try recording one more time and I will move her around I will rotate her a little bit and I will make her turn invisible and back on and this time those show up in the timeline because they were aren't for recording so for live stuff don't have to worry about this is just gonna show up live and that's working fine but if you want to record those values and show up in the timeline you're gonna want to make sure you arm each of those individually all right so that is an overview of the new trigger system it is going to take some time to learn if you're used to the old system and doing the Obscure hunting for height others and group and latching and all that stuff it's gonna take a little time to get used to the new system but we're happy to help please if you're running into any rigging issues please post in the official forums and we will try our best to help you understand how to get your puppets up and running as quickly as possible and for all new puppets hopefully this is going to make life a lot easier and give you a lot more power and flexibility of how you perform and what your character can do in the future so we're really excited to see what people create using this alright that's it for this first video hopefully that helps get you up and running with new trigger system and controls panel next up is everything else we have a whole second part that goes into detail with the new physics behavior clipping masks new rigging improvements and a lot more so definitely check that out and have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 35,331

Keywords: adobe, character animator, animation, tutorial, new features, triggers, midi, controls

Id: 1iS0gUoe1i8

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017