Characterizer (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial)

a lot of times people see character animator and say oh this looks great but I can't draw or it takes too long to rig a puppet or whatever their excuses well that is not a valid excuse anymore with the introduction of characterized or a new feature we've added an Adobe character animator cc 2019 basically what this does is take a capture of your face and then apply a style overtop of it whether that's a painting or a statue or a hand sketch drawing like this and turned yourself into an animated character in just a matter of minutes so in this video we'll start with the capture process how do you set everything up and make sure all your settings are optimized for the best results we'll dig into the edit mode where you can adjust all the different parameters to get your style looking exactly like you want how to bring that into character animator and then finally how to add your own unique custom styles to apply to your captures as well so characterize ur is in the start workspace up here all you have to do is click open characterize ur so this is your first time using characterize ur you're not gonna see a bunch of faces I've used it a couple times for myself and my seven-year-old son Cameron so they're showing up here as disembodied heads if I wanted to go back into a capture I've already done I would just select it click it and it would open up I can also delete any existing captures by hovering over them and clicking the delete icon but for now I would want to go through the create new capture process no 99% of time this is probably what you want to do is just click this create new capture button however down here and more options if you click on this you have two additional options of ways to capture so the first is select an image this is going to allow you to take one static image and stylize it based off of that you're not going to get the full fidelity that you would with all the different mouth shapes and expressions that you're doing with a full capture process but this is nice if you do want to do you know a one-off profile pic of your friend or something you know very specific with only one face and you really don't need the lip-sync this is a nice out the second is manual capture and this is just a process kind of a backup that gives you a different way to go through the capture process we recommend try and create new capture first but if that doesn't work or if you're running into troubles based off your lighting or environment or whatever manual capture may be a good way to go instead but for the sake of this tutorial let's go and click create new capture so if everything's set up correctly you should see something like this your face a webcam a little overlay here the Auto Meter moving up and down and voiceover that's given you some instructions if you don't see your face here you can go to the camera icon down here and just pick whichever camera you know webcam you want to use for best results you want to make sure your face is close to the cameras possible filling in this this circle you're kind of centered you know you see your nose isn't over here or anything like that you're kind of centered and as symmetrical as you can be and you're well lit your face is well lit and you're not having a very cluttered background so I took down some posters and stuff like that in the background that I thought might get in the way because basically what's gonna happen is it's gonna extract your face and head and if there's a lot of clutter it might think those pieces are part of your head so if you're wearing headphones or you have a you know colorful poster in the background that sort of stuff try to give yourself as neutral of a background as possible light your face get close to the camera and when you're ready click start capture so let's try out this process I'm just gonna run through the steps and you'll see it's a pretty quick process 1 3 2 1 make a surprised expression in 3 2 1 repeat after me Adobe Adobe Photoshop Photoshop Lightroom woohoo alright so that gives me this nice little grid of all my different faces so these first five here these were you know the directed ones neutral closed smile frown surprised and then all these vision shapes all these different mouth shapes were taken automatically when said those words Adobe Photoshop Lightroom woohoo and you noticed I was being very particular about the way I pronounce these I didn't say it really quickly Adobe Photoshop let you know like that I was very Adobe Photoshop I feel like you get the best results when you are very deliberate in your pronunciations and try to exaggerate those mouth shapes you know be really open and closed and just you know really focus on trying to pronounce every single syllable and sound of those individual words so when you're done with that click continue and that's gonna take you to a little finished screen and then load up the settings alright so that turned out to be a pretty good capture I think I can look through my different faces and captures by cooking the little arrow icons to the left to right of this face and seeing how they all turned out and making sure everything looks like it you know got masked out and and the features seem clear and all of that stuff so right now we're in edit mode and honestly I feel like this is the heart of the feature this is where you spend the most time just playing around and tweaking things and adjusting and trying to get a style that works for you so character animator comes with a bunch of prepackaged styles these have all been licensed from the original artist and if you roll over any of these you'll see the name and the artist and the year that they were made but you are free to use these for your styles as much as you want but you also have the option to add a new style and take any image and use that as a style we'll get to that in a little later but let's start with just one of the prepackaged styles this guy kin by Adrian Morgan all I do is click the thumbnail and immediately renders out a version of that over here and I can see I've started to get some of the oil painting textures of this particular character but doesn't stop there you have a lot of flexibility over how this is stylized and the place I always start up here is the stylization slider this is going to determine how much of the stylization is applied to your face so if I want a lot of style ization if I want a lot of the features and details from that style I'll turn the stylization slider all the way up to 100 and that's gonna add you know the bags under my eyes a lot more shading and shadows and wrinkles and all that stuff all those details and features from that original image but if I wanted to look a little bit more like my face I can drag this all the way to the left to zero and that's gonna do a really minimal application of the style and look a little bit more like my face and I can try the different faces by clicking the left or right arrows it'll take a second to render and then apply the style to those faces as well so you can do you know two or three of these see how they look and then you know go back and they're rendered and so they behave pretty quickly so at fifty percent which is the default you're kind of getting half and half you're getting half of your capture half of the stylization applied and you know you can tweak this as much or as little as you want towards one way or the other to get the desired look that you're going for the next slider down here feature exaggeration I'll use this if I kind of want to anonymize myself a little bit so if I don't want this to look like my face instead I want to make a different type of character I can try adjusting this slider a little bit more and seeing what different you know features I can kind of warp and pronounce a little bit more or less to get a slightly different looking character if you go really far extreme you're gonna get some really weird-looking characters so you know and maybe that's what you want for a particular character that's fine those are some options you have one thing to note when you roll over this you'll see it says characterized facial features not available when head turns is checked we'll get to that in a second but if you're gonna use the head turn checkbox feature exaggeration is not going to work in this version next up is cycles and if you have used character animator in the past you know about cycle layers where basically you are doing a frame by frame version of you know a pink sequence or multiple layers and a group or something like that this is the same idea where you can select how many randomly synthesized frames you want so let's just pick send like four and it's going to go through this render process where it's looking around at all the individual pixels and just shifting them ever so slightly and what this does is give it kind of a live Illustrated or live drawn effect and I think it's a really nice look it helps it feel a little bit more hand-drawn and handcrafted and add a little bit of extra life and dynamics to the character so you know honestly the majority of the time I am turning cycles on for my puppets and sometimes I'll do just two or three just to give it a little life when you get up to six you do start to get to potential performance issues when you have you know a lot of characters because basically what it's doing is you know adding multiple versions for each eye each you know mouth shape each head all of that stuff and so it tends to be a very heavy file that comes out of it so just before warrant if you've got the computer and it can handle it great otherwise you might want to keep your cycles on the lower side or not have any at all these next to resolution and quality go hand in hand these are various options you can do to change you know the sizing and the quality of what you're seeing here if you select higher values things are probably gonna move a little bit slower it's gonna take a little bit of extra processing time to put these things together but you're gonna get a slightly different stylized image so you'll see the image rendering here this is what it currently looked like and as the resolution gets added in you'll see there's a lot more fidelity and I can see this little scratch marks and the brushstrokes and the eyes and all of that so it's worth it to play around with these and see what works best for your system as well as you know the specific style that you're going for head only this if you check this it's just gonna take the body and the background out of the equation just show you a disembodied head so if you wanted to place this over top of something else in a rig or something like that that's an option to have but by default that is off and the last thing is head turns if you check this when your puppet is rendered it will also render quarter views of the head on the left and the right to give your character a little bit of extra dimension I usually check this because I think it adds a nice little effect when you turn your head your character will automatically turn your head and it just automatically does it you don't have to do this in the capture process it's gonna automatically move your features to look like it's slightly turning but again you cannot preview that in here you're only gonna see that when you click generate puppet which we'll get to in a second but it's a nice feature to have we've kind of gone through all the steps for this one style but honestly a lot of the time I'm just playing around with different styles I'll select them try them out see how they look and depending on the look that I'm going for you know I can get a wide variety of results from just one face so you know if I want to make a statue version of myself for example I can do something like that or if I'm going for more of a you know sketched look even a really simple you know this is a napkin cocktail napkin sketch that was probably done in just you know a couple of seconds but it actually makes for a pretty nice style so yeah click on a bunch of these different things see what looks good to you try yourself as a colored pencil sketch or a charcoal sketch or you know an oil painting or whatever and it's it's really fun to just play around with all these settings and get very different effects alright so if you're happy with how things are looking and want to bring this into character animator you would just go up here to generate puppet and click that if you just want a frame of your character just a single static image you can right click here and you can do export frame and that's just going to save an individual PNG file of this this face but most of the time you're probably just going to want generate puppets so I'll click that and now it's going to go through the rendering process if you have cycles applied or head turns this is going to take a little longer it can take you know a few minutes with all that stuff on but I've done a pretty simple face here so it should be a pretty quick process so there we go that is going to immediately open it up in a new character animator scene and you will see your character move around and talk with you for the first time now as usual and character animator you have full control over how strong or weak these different parts are so if I don't like the eyebrows moving that much I can go into face here twirl that open and let's try eyebrow strength and bring that down a little bit and then when I move my eyebrows it's gonna be a much more subtle effect instead same thing with eye gaze if you see your pupils are moving you know too far to the side one way or the other I would change camera strength down instead of a hundred percent to something a little bit lower and then they won't move as much with your own eye movements so with the picture-frame version of this I basically just added you know this frame layer over top of my character in my scene and then made it look like you know I'm a talking painting this character also has the head turns which I did not check off in the other one but you'll notice as I turn my head the character is turning his head as well now this has also generated a PSD file of this character so if I look this was characterized her too so let's find that character over here if I double click it it'll open up in rig mode and I can see exactly how everything was tagged and set up you can see he went really dig into it it gets pretty complicated where we added all these sticks and fixed handles and things like that but if you wanted to open up the Photoshop file you can just click this and go to edit edit original and that's gonna open up the original file in Photoshop and if you really dig in here you can see behind the scenes how some of this stuff was made so you can see if I turn off this this neutral mouth right here in the mouth group I can see my eyes my eyeballs showing up there in the background and then I can go between my different faces so you can see every mouth shape is actually a full face and so the whole face changes as I talk which is a pretty nice effect because it gives me all these you know wrinkles and movements in the jaw and the cheeks and the eyes and and that's kind of how everything works together so the nice thing is I've got the full you know power of Photoshop to adjust some of these if I don't like the coloring or I feel like you know the mouth I'm gonna darken that a little bit or something like that I can go in and select each of these you know individual parts and make the various adjustments that I want to each face so if you have you know a certain perfectionist tendencies like I do you're probably gonna want to open the Photoshop file and play around with some stuff inside here so jumping back to characterize err you will probably reach a point where you want to add your own styles as well so I'm gonna go to create new style and I just made this image of this you know global digital painting that I did using some Photoshop brushes a pretty simple quick you know color study and sketch that I did so I'm just gonna select that and open it you'll see enable all formats we've got PNG and a J down here so I'm gonna click open and that's going to take me through a two-step process to set this face up so have my tools down here the selection tool allows me to take any red dot and move it around I can also drag over a bunch of dots at the same time and if I select a dot when all of those are selected I will drag them all at the same time and then I have zoom which will allow me to zoom in and the hand icon will allow me to pan around so normally I want to zoom in a little bit closer to get really fine detail onto these different parts so for the eyebrows for example I'm gonna select one of these and you see I give this a nice little guide here that's kind of teaching me where my part should go so it's same for the eyebrows I should put the lines overtop of the eyebrows and kind of equally distribute the the red dots so I'm gonna try something like that let's move these over and I'll do the same for the other eyebrow as well that looks pretty good for the pupils I've got a couple of controls if I click this dot in the search Center it's gonna allow me to move the whole circle around and if I click this little circle on the edge that's gonna allow me to resize and rescale the pupils so I want to make sure that's kind of the full you know covers the entire part of the pupil this job you know automatically when you bring something in its character animators gonna try to do its best to connect with things but it's not always going to line up correctly and so you're probably gonna have to dig in there and do a little bit of adjusting around these different sections but basically all you have to do is use these images over here as a guide of how to set things up and just you know adjust the outlines to match your style and you know what every once in a while you're gonna run into weird things like this artwork for example his nose is a triangle it doesn't really fit you know this nostril below the nostrils thing but what I can do is you know in this case I would probably just you know make the bridge of the nose follow this line here that's the kind of the important part and then I'm gonna kind of shorten these other features over here so play around with these I mean you can get really dramatic different effects from where you place these dots so you can always jump back into this mode even if you've already said it so you can go back and adjust very easily so try some stuff out see what happens and then come back if it's not working correctly with the mouth I'm kind of just making sure the middle is showing here and then I've got a little bit of the outside area for where the you know the lips would be basically as you're seeing in the image over here you just want you you want to make sure that the teeth are anything inside the mouth is kind of between these these two green you know lip areas that hold in the spacebar key I can pan automatically and I can just drag to really easily do that and just adjust some of these you know outline parts to make sure they're matching the contours of the face but notice how I'm not including the ears I'm kind of just going with the contours of how the the edges of the face here and overall I think that's mapping pretty well to the facial features of my character so I'm going to go and click the next button now this next step is determining where your different regions are and basically you're just gonna paint over the different sections of your character so my default face is selected you see this little guide layer here of this guy and as I move through you can see it's selecting the different colors and different portions of this guy's face so with the face brush I can just kind of click on here and drag and over any area that is skin so I'm looking for any area of the facial area that's skin now I noticed there's some hair here that didn't didn't get added in so I'm just like the hair brush now and just started painting green over top of that if I need to adjust the brush size I can go over here and make it you know a little bit bigger or smaller and I can also use the mouse wheel if I've got that hooked up to do the exact same thing so you'll notice by hair we're really talking about the hair on the top of the head we're not talking about facial hair like this guy has that would be included in the face so just you know small distinction but an important one and I have a nice little preview of how things are being masked out over here so I can make sure everything is looking correctly and you know if I had like you know too much background over here that's gonna show up and I can just select background and paint over to get rid of that so you can see the background kind of being isolated here go back to the face go back to the hair and just make sure all these sections look like you would want them to the neck by default nothing was painted in so I'm gonna have to do that painting myself but basically anywhere the you see skin here so even if it's like a low-cut shirt or you see a little bit more you know of under the collar and that sort of thing anywhere but their skin that's where you should do the neck that's that's where that mask should happen and if I want to refine this a little bit and go back to the face tool and just kind of you know go over some of those parts to make sure it's it looks alright and the final one is clothing and this is just going to map to your own clothing your own you know body area so I'm just gonna go over that so that's looking pretty good so I'm gonna go through all these and make sure all my masks are looking okay again this is not set in stone if some reason something isn't working out you can always come back to this stuff later on but I like how this is looking so let's go to done and so yeah there you go now this style is gonna show up in my list and it will be immediately applied to whatever face I have loaded up so that's looking good but if I did want to go back in and just I just hover over click the pencil icon and I'll go back into those edit style steps now I want to note a couple of things when you're picking your own styles number one you really want to look for head-on portraits those are gonna work best if you have a side profile view or someone looking up or down too much that's not gonna translate as well so in general you want your original source to be facing straight on and you want the portrait to be straight on secondly I would say the best styles the ones that seem to work the best are the ones that have very distinct textures or brush strokes or details to them so things like an oil painting or as cross-hatched style you know from from currency or statues or things like that this is not gonna work as well if you bring in you know a cartoon character like Bart Simpson or Rick and Morty or something like that the lines just aren't going to line up and have those distinct cartoon features that you might expect so my advice would be find things with very distinctive styles brush strokes the painting or a stone texture from a statue or sign like that rather than very distinct features like big cartoon eyes or a you know very distinctive stroke around the characters face these type of things like we're seeing here in the default examples those are the styles that are gonna work the best and what you're seeing here for the eyes is kind of an approximation of what you'll see but you'll notice the original source image I had for this character he had blue eyes and we do a few things behind the scenes to kind of speed things up in this preview process but for the exact look of the eyes you're gonna want to go to the generate puppet and then you'll see the final version of the I show up so notice these ones are much more blue and in line with that original style that I had so you know you might see a difference there and for best results you know we're doing things for speed and performance and characterized err itself but to see the final output you'll want to generate puppet and make sure that everything is looking as you want so that is characterized err within a matter of minutes you are able to take your face take a style that either is prepackaged or made on your own and generate an animated custom puppet like this so if you wanted to recreate aha steak on me video this is the way to do it I don't know why you would it's a classic it shouldn't be touched but in case you want to it's here so we'd love to see what you make with this please use hash tag character animator when sharing things on social media because we would love to see all the things that you create with this and then if you run into any issues things aren't working out right your captures aren't working your Styles aren't lining up correctly the best place to get help is the official character animator forums so that's it for day thank you very much for watching and have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 143,497

Keywords: Adobe Character Animator CC, Character Animator, character animation, okay samurai, tutorial, face, style, masking, puppet

Id: z02AcZhxSfs

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018