Character Animator Tips & Tricks (November 2017)

[Music] it is his daily Duty character I'm a dirty man welcome to the November episode of tips and tricks today we'll start off with a community spotlight and especially take a look at three different users who are using video game controllers as ways to control their characters then we'll move on into the mailbox section where we answer your user questions especially taking a closer look at the new physics tags and how they work or don't work together in different combinations then last month was Adobe MAX in Las Vegas and Dan Ramirez taught in an advanced class and we're we have that project file and 50 page PDF for you to download so I'll show you how to do that and a quick walkthrough of what to expect from that advanced class and then finally looking a quick look at a tip about making the Nutcracker child behavior be a little bit more connected to the rest of your head that's it for this month so let's get started starting off this month we've got mr. Brown this is an awesome character created by a guy named Tony living over in Japan and the interesting thing about this is he has actually created three separate YouTube channels all starring this character sketch flicks which is a creative channel set samay where he explains various concepts and kaiju Kojo which is about games TV and movies and so he's made this little fun expressive character that has a lot of depth to it that he can reuse on every channel and it doesn't matter if it's live pre-recorded video games drawing tutorial talk show it doesn't matter because he's got this rich deep character that he can reuse over and over again to narrate and go through these different experiences and I think this is the same thing we've seen with scribbly on Twitch and others if you invest your time in one really detailed deep character rig the results can really pay off in this case you know he's able to create multiple things a week with this character across three different channels and it's just this one guy doing it all so excellent work Tony I can tell that you're passionate and it's really entertaining to watch this character across all these different channels and creations so job well done the way a lot of us interact with characters even outside of character animator is in video games with video game control and this stuff's just second nature to us we know that if you move the right analog stick you will zoom a character in and out or zoom the camera that left and right will move the character left and right in different buttons do different things and what's cool about this is three users in the past month have been experimenting with using video game controllers to control puppets in character animator and the results are pretty awesome so we'll start off with Tom Shar Stein he has found out a way to connect a ps3 controller to a PC he's using xpadder which is a $10 program that map's mouse and keyboard inputs to video game controllers and then a free program called autohotkey where you can write scripts to make different combinations as new keys or stacks or that sort of thing and in fact he also recommended something called pullovers macro creator which is a free tool that helps you write scripts for autohotkey am i doing all of that and combining those together he was able to use his ps3 controller to do all these triggers and rigging for his character and so he can do I control different eyebrow triggers blushing all of these different things to create a really expressive rig and says it's you know really natural to be able to do it with a video game controller and for Tom and all the others that I'm showing here all the links to all the applications that I'm talking about are going to be in the video description below so if you want to check them out and try these things on your own feel free to next up we've got our friends of digital puppets and they've found a way to hook up an Xbox 360 controller to PC and also have MIDI input as part of that so they're using key sticks which is another program that lets you map keyboard and mouse inputs to a controller and that is about 15 bucks and then ocean Swift Xbox MIDI controller this translates your controller into different MIDI inputs and that's about $15 as well and so they've got all these triggers set to the various buttons XY ba all of that to you know show certain key triggers but the coolest part is that they figured out a way to do the right analog stick to both scale and position Y so as they move that up and down the character will zoom in and out but it will also change why position so they can have it so that you know the head is always centered or it you know the body is exactly where they want it in the Y position they've said they're gonna do a full YouTube tutorial about this soon so as soon as they do that I'll make sure to link it in the video description below so excellent work as usual guys and finally we got Dan Ramirez from the character animator team he has been fooling around on the Mac with a way to connect his ps4 controller using an app called ps4 hid to MIDI and he was just fooling around with kind of hooking up this arrow to gravity and seeing what he could could do with that I think it's he wants to make an asteroids game or something along those lines and so it's great to see all these experiments people are trying different things out and it's just a really nice natural fun way to control a character with a video game controller and I'm sure we will be showing more examples of this type of stuff in future episodes our first mailbox question this month comes to us from test monkey who says it looks like the way you export and import has changed with the last update can you explain what I need to do now well importing actually is the same you can always just go to file import and that's going to bring in any PSD or AI file any Photoshop or illustrator file as a shortcut you can also double click on any blank space here in the project panel and that is also going to bring up the the import dialog and as far as export you've got a ton of different options right if you just wanted to export this as a video you could go to file export video via Adobe Media encoder that's going to send it to AME and allow you to export this as any type of video file in any sort of format you want so if you've just record a performance and want a video that's the best way to do it now a lot of people want to add finishing touches in Premiere Pro or After Effects or something like that and so you would just dynamic link your character animator project into one of those we've shown this several times but just to reiterate if I got rid of this background for example in here so I've just got my character in this recorded performance that I've done then in After Effects all I have to do is file import file and find the CH proj file that includes whatever recording I've done hit open that's going to show me all available scenes I know Meera's is the one I want I click okay and that's going to bring in my recording as a dynamic linked sequence I can then drag this into the new composition and that will make it show up as a new composition and I can add additional background foreground other elements to this now in the old days of character animator one way that people would export is through a ping sequence and wav file and we've actually still got that if you go to file export ping sequence and wave but we definitely recommend doing dynamic link now just because the ping sequence is so limited and it just gives you so many different files and if you make any edits or changes to your original puppet or your recording or anything like that you're dealing with baked in files for the pink sequence and so it won't automatically update dynamic link is definitely the way we recommend now if you still want to use the pink sequence in wav file you can do that but you're gonna have to go through a few extra steps to do so now in the past in After Effects there was file scripts and there was this thing called new comp from character animator recording you'll see that in the latest 2018 version of After Effects that is not here anymore but in the video description I have included a link to this old dot JSX script file and so all you would have to do is download that go to run script file find that new comp from character animator recording JSX hit open then you would find your ping sequence select a ping from the sequence as the title says here and import it and that's the way to do it for me personally though I'm using After Effects dynamic link from character animator about 99% of the time there's rare occasions where I'm just okay with exporting in a straight video from character animator very very rare occasions where I'm using the ping sequence dynamic link is definitely the most flexible and easiest way to export your character animator recordings and of course your last option is live streaming if you go into the stream tab up here that's going to take you to stream mode and you want to make sure this little icon is clicked on for streaming live if you command click that on Mac or ctrl click that on Windows you'll get all your preferences here and actually if you click on learn more about live streaming here at the bottom this takes you to a site that doesn't just have all extensive details about all the different things you can do live but also the things we just talked about about dynamic link and Annie and ping sequences and all of that stuff so you know if you have any questions about how to export or what your options are this is the best place to go next question is a two-parter coming from judge Detroit wonderful updates questions number one how did you get the robot wheel to constantly rotate is that a cycle with continuous selected yeah that's exactly it so this example film BOTS who was in one of the new features videos he's got a wheel that's moving at the bottom all that is is a 12 frame cycle layers continuous behavior so if I double click into him you will see that his wheel is just 12 frames I can even double click into that and show you every frame is just the wheel turning a little bit more I could've done a better job of keeping the origin centered there like a real wheel but you know that's how it goes and this wheel is set to start immediately in cycle continuously so anytime you have a wheel or something like that you could just have it start right away not be triggered just happen continuously and it'll just start going the second part of the question says on the physics section would you still add dangle to the wrecking ball that's in the upper right or would you not add dangle but instead use other physics elements so he's talking about you know this this physics playground is another free example project you can use to try it and play around with physics but this wrecking ball in the top how was this put together so let's go into rig mode and you'll see all it is is these kind of nested groups that each are tagged as collide and dynamic and there is no dangle associate with it in fact if you roll over dynamic you'll see it says used by behavior physics usually combined with collide tag incompatible with dangle tag so you really don't want to combine these two Dingell and dynamic in fact I made a little example project here and all I did was have these you know seven red squares and I tagged them different things dangle collide dynamic or combinations of them and if we go into the actual scene here that's what happens so dangled by itself is gonna be like you know a little bit like a flag it's got a little Dingle handle I added in the corner there collide I can move it but it's not going to fall it doesn't have dynamic so it's not subject to the laws of gravity like the dynamic one which you'll notice if I fresh this it's just gonna go straight through the scenes cuz it doesn't have collide it doesn't have a collide tag so it's not gonna collide with everything the most common thing we see is probably this collide and dynamic that's going to give you an element that is both going to be subject to the laws of gravity be dynamic and collide with anything else that's also tagged as collide now when you start to get into these last three I want to recommend doing these Dingell and collide yeah it's got the dangle but why it doesn't really make sense why you would do this and same thing with Dingell and dynamic and Dingell Plus collide plus dynamic both of these have dynamic but they are not falling like dynamic did over here because of that complication when you've got both dangle and dynamic tag so basically I would stick to these four on the left personally dangle collide dynamic or collide and dynamic and leave those other guys off and last question day comes to us from Martin Nelson I'm gonna summarize this question but basically he's asking about what selected and why are certain things showing up in the right-hand side when it doesn't look like that's the thing that's selected and so on so the way this can be a little confusing the way that this right properties area works is basically what's the last thing that you've selected so in this case I'm selecting Cassandra in the timeline and that's what's showing up on the right hand side here if I select animal BG instead background I'm actually selecting this background PSD and I'm looking at the behaviors over there same with if I select a scene here or a puppet here or other things whatever is the last thing you've selected this also happens in rig mode if I go in here and select individual layers or groups whatever is that last thing I selected is what's going to show up here on the right side so yeah you can run into a few kind of confusing situations like here I've got Cassandra in the timeline selected and I'm seeing her properties over here but in the project panel it looks like physics playground is selected but you'll always be able to tell by whatever is at the top of the properties here so here I can clearly see it's Cassandra that's what I'm dealing with she's in the timeline that's the sort of stuff that I'm editing here with the properties if I click on physics example I'll see that listed up here and so on and so forth I get scene properties if I select to see so as you're going through stuff just make a mental note of what's at the top of that properties panel and what is that the last thing that you selected because that is what the properties on the right is reflecting thank you to everyone who came out for Adobe MAX this year there were 12,000 of you if they came to Las Vegas and did several labs and saw a bunch of innovative stuff that Adobe is doing with multiple projects and for character animator we had we taught over 600 people beginner character animator lesson and an advanced character animator lesson and you guys created some really awesome puppets and creations and it was a lot of fun teaching the class and we hope to do this every year moving forward but if you weren't there Dan Ramirez taught an advanced character animator class and basically let me bring the video over here this was the end result of it where Windigo has a baseball at this carnival type setup using Adobe stock the aunt comes in takes the baseball walks back throws it knocks the different little bottles over and then Wendigo gets surprised and hands him balloons the aunt grabs the balloons and floats off into the stratosphere so there's a lot of you know things going on here different you know walk walk cycles physics being able to actually throw something and hit them the switching of the balloons in hands and then eventually the aunts getting the balloons in having gravity effect him it's a lot of advanced techniques and Dan has made this whole project available to everyone online to be able to download so the way you would get it is go to the start panel and click on Red Monster here where it says see more click on him and then on this examples page if you scroll down to the additional puppet resources there's a line here dan Ramirez did an advanced class that Adobe MAX download the worksheet and example files and so that's gonna download this whole project you'll notice it's divided into separate exercises so if you just want to learn about physics or you know rigging the ants or shareable puppets all these different things that he's added you have the ability to do that and it includes a 49 page PDF that goes into everything in detail and it has a ton of screenshots and showing you how to solve things if you are in advanced character animator user I highly recommend going through this whole thing is probably going to take you a couple of hours but by the end of it I think you're gonna understand a lot of the new really cool features that have been added into the latest release of character animator and it's only gonna help you make your scenes and puppets that much more alive and expressive ah yes the Nutcracker jaw this has always been a great alternative for the usual mouth swapping for lip sync so instead of showing different mouths for every different sound that you're saying instead this is just one group that's moving up and down to match your own jaw movement in the webcam or and/or the audio amplitude as you're talking you'll notice my Nutcracker jaw behavior here has camera input and audio input both armed and the flap eNOS levels are set appropriately so this is the old way that Bongo the gorilla looked and this guy is a free downloadable puppet although you don't want this version there's a new version I'm going to show you in a second because we changed several things actually two people on the team Dan Ramirez and Dave Simons figured out a way to make this feel a little bit more connected in the latest version and you'll notice that's not always been one of the shortcomings that felt with Nutcracker jawless it feels so disconnected from the rest of the character right as I'm talking you can even see sometimes it completely leaves the looks like it's really floating if I really push up these flap enos parameters you can see how it really becomes disconnected from the rest of the head so that's no good so let's look at how the old version was rigged and then I'll show you how the new version is and you can use it as a guide for helping create this sort of effect in your own puppets all right so you always you know got your character selected up here Nutcracker jaw added as a behavior over here and it says target handles one it means one thing has been that seen to work with Nutcracker jaw that has been tagged as a jaw layer so if I go to my jog group here this is a group that's been set to independent with a little crown icon meaning that can move on its own and if I go down here I can see that that has been tagged as a jaw and that just means when I talk because I have nut cracker jaw this group named jaw is going to move up and down but as you can see it is very disconnected from everything else so the way that they fix this in the new version the jaw is not independent and when things are not independent that means anything else that it's connected to with this yellow line over here or anything you're seeing with this yellow outline on the right side and the canvas that means it's going to pull and bend and warp on those things collectively but when you start adding a lot of fixed handles and sticks and things like that you can really constrain the amount of warping or pulling and or you know where certain parts stick and where certain parts Bend so if I go into the jaw actually if I double-click this so the first thing you notice is the whole group is not tagged as jaw but instead this stick right here that's in the middle has been tagged as a jaw so that's the actual thing that's been tagged and is going to try to move up and down as you talk now there's these fixed handles that are set up here basically meaning you know these parts are gonna stay up top and then this whole area in the middle is what's going to warp and Bend and pull as this jaw stick is moving up and down now to preserve the fidelity of the teeth here they added in the sticks kind of around them to help kind of serve as a force field right to protect them from the bending and the warping and that's kind of a nice trick when you want to keep things doing that sort of thing and then you'll see in the head they actually added quite a few other fixed handles just to keep certain face elements in place okay so when you put this all together what does it look like so now as I'm talking look what's happening the jaw is moving up and down but it is more connected it is because it is not independent it's not moving as one piece up and down it's actually connected to the other pieces that are also not independent with it so that's including the cheeks and the jaw and all that stuff and you'll notice it works and looks really really nice so the bottom line here is if you play around with fixed handles with sticks and with independence in these parts of the head you can get some really nice effects of things pulling up and down now you have to play with the parameters here a lot because you know if you bring this too far up then you'll really get something that doesn't look that great but you probably wouldn't want to do that so Bongo is the very first example on our free examples adobe puppets page so you can download him check out exactly how they did this and see if this is something that you can add to your own puppets alright that's it for this episode thank you very much for watching and if you want to be considered for that community spotlight thing that we show at the beginning of these videos the best way to do that is use hash tag character animator all one word on when you post things on social media and we monitor that pretty closely you can also tweet to me at okay Samurai and I will do my best to check it out and give you feedback or you know give you a like or thumbs up for that sort of thing and I usually forward a lot of that stuff to the rest of the team as well so we can all kind of see what people are up to now we get a lot of submissions so unfortunately we can't put them all into videos but rest assured at least someone is checking it out other than that if you have any bug reports issues rigging problems with your puppets the best place to get help on that stuff are the official character animator forms for myself or other people from the team will try to help solve whatever issues you have but yep that's it for this month thank you very much for watching and have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 27,300

Keywords: adobe, character animator, tips, tricks, tutorial, animation, cartoon

Id: Qx9X0i61hgs

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017