Intro to Rigging (Adobe Character Animator)

hey everyone this is dave from the adobe character animator team and in general character animator has a lot of characters that you can use for your projects whether that's ones from the home screen ones you download online or even ones you customize using the puppet maker tool but there's a lot about you out there who want to make your own puppets from scratch right we all have our unique drawing styles and wouldn't it be nice if we see our characters come to life and so if you fall into that camp this is the video for you this is an introduction to all things rigging we're going to start with the artwork creation and talk about how we we're going to organize everything into groups and layers and certain naming conventions that character animator is going to understand how to animate it later then we'll jump into character animator specifically in rig mode and show you how to add things like handles and tags and behaviors to have your puppet start to come to life and finally we're going to end with a walkthrough of a free example a download project of 15 different common body types and features in character animator that's everything from very simple straight on characters to characters with head and body turns to full body tracking so if you've ever wanted to make your own character from scratch let's get started alright so i'm ready to start creating my first character from scratch and the first question i have to ask myself is where do i want to create this character because you don't actually create the artwork in character animator itself you're actually using uh programs like adobe photoshop or adobe illustrator to create psd or ai files these are layered files that then character animator will be able to interpret where all the different parts are and how it animates and all of that now you're not limited to photoshop or illustrator for example a lot of times i use adobe fresco on my ipad pro i draw the character on that and then i bring it into photoshop as a psd file you can export it out as a psd and that works well also one of the most common questions we get is people asking well what programs should i use is there a benefit to using illustrator over photoshop or vice versa and my general answer is go with whatever you feel most comfortable and familiar with honestly statistics show that it's about half and half it's kind of a a swap between the two so there's no you know majority of people using one program or the other um for me when i'm creating my own characters these are two characters that i've created really for me it goes with the style of character that i'm going for so when i'm doing a more hyper detailed character like this robot evan flamethrower over here with these you know laser effects and fire and this metal texture and all of that i'm going to tend to do that in photoshop it just gives me more ability to do more that hand-drawn detailed look whereas when i'm going for kind of a more clean cel-shaded type character like lyndon over here this guitar playing character and i've got the you know the strokes around the edges and all of that stuff and kind of more uh flat uh shapes uh more what i would expect from a traditional cartoon then i'm gonna go with uh illustrator but that's just my personal preference you do what you feel most comfortable with and you're going to end up fine so for the purposes of today's tutorial i'm going to stick to adobe illustrator it's just a little bit easier for me to create the shapes simply that i want to quickly and put everything together that way but 99 of what i'm gonna be saying today translates directly to photoshop as well so um you can follow along with either program and if there are particular aspects of the process where photoshop greatly differs from illustrator i'm going to call them out so you know what's going on all right so i'm here on the adobe illustrator home screen and i'm going to go ahead and go to new file in the upper left corner and that's going to bring up this dialog allowing me to set up my document however i want so typically i'm going to set my documents up something like 1500 by 1500 pixels this is going to give me enough space to create a nice big character that's going to fit well in a typical hd setup let's say a 1920x1080 um video something like that and that allows me to rescale and move my character around without you know getting pixelated or blurry or anything like that the other thing i note is make sure your color mode is set to rgb color instead of cmyk color that's just going to work a little bit better for the screen based stuff that we're doing here and here's what my settings would look like in photoshop so it's also 1500 by 1500 pixels i've got a resolution of 72 pixels per inch i don't need to go above that for screen based stuff so don't if this is 150 or 300 go ahead and turn that down to 72. i've also got rgb color and you probably want your background contents to be transparent other because if you can choose a white or black or something else it's actually going to show up as a layer that character animator is going to think is included as part of your character and you probably don't want that so go ahead and select transparent all right so heading back to illustrator i'm happy with my settings i'm going to go ahead and click create now depending on your version of illustrator or how you've set things up your screen might look a little bit different from mine i'm going with the default up here workspace i'm just going with essentials and that is going to allow me to just get the basics really all i care about though is this layers panel over here and these tools on the left those are the main things that i'll be using today so the first thing i'm going to do is go up here to my layers tab i'm going to double click on the layer 1 that's already been created and i'm going to call this plus puppet so why am i doing this well this is going to be my main container that i'm going to put everything else inside so plus puppet plus is a secret code that we use for character animator to make a group or layer independent when it's imported we'll talk about that a little later later don't worry about that now and then puppet is just a generic term we're using this could be anything this could be plus billy or plus sally or whatever name you want for your character but a more general term that you can use for this is just plus puppet then i'm gonna go down here and create two more layers click this twice and i'm gonna rename these to head and body like that and then i'm going to drag both of these into my plus puppet uh layer right here and this is the typical setup for 99 of the puppets that you will ever make in character animator plus puppet with head and body inside now if you're in photoshop we're going to do things a little bit differently actually what we're going to do is you can't really drag a layer into another layer here in photoshop that that's not possible instead what i'm gonna do is uh click on this little add group create new group i'm gonna click that three times and then i'm gonna double click and rename this plus puppet and this one head and this one body so and then i can shift select and drag these into my puppet so uh i have the same structure as illustrator so this is one major difference between the two applications the way that we're going to set up these collections or these these groups in character in photoshop you're going to want to create the actual groups themselves and in illustrator you're just going to want to drag layers into other layers you can do grouping in illustrator but i found it's a little bit more confining um in what you can do and how you can move things around and so for beginners i think it's a little bit easier to do it the way that i was showing earlier but that is one difference between the two applications so if you're wondering like how you're creating a group in one or the other just remember in photoshop it's going to be this little folder icon and in illustrator it's going to be dragging layers into other layers okay so now that the basic structure is out of the way i'm ready to start creating my actual character artwork this is not going to be nickelodeon or disney level of animation we're just going to be using really simple shapes to really quickly make things and get the point across so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go down here and create one more new layer and i'm going to drag this inside my head so now i've got let me drag this out a little bit so i can see a little bit more so layer 4 right now is inside my head it was previously outside of it and i just dragged it into the head here and now i'm going to go over here to this shape tool over here right now it's the rectangle tool by default i'm going to go ahead and click and hold on it and select the ellipse tool instead so i get a more rounded head shape and then what i'm going to do is go over here to the top of my canvas and i'm just going to click and drag and make a basic head that takes out maybe like one-fourth or one-fifth of the screen like that so there we go now i've got a basic circle shape but i'm going to probably want to add some color to this so i'm going to go down here to my color my fill and my stroke color over here i'm going to double click on the fill layer and bring up this color picker and i can make this whatever color i want so let's do like a blue color something like that maybe a deeper blue and click ok and there we go i also have a stroke if i select the stroke instead and double click on this i can select a color for that as well so i could do like go to black here click ok and then go over to my properties and change the stroke to be a little bit bigger something like you know 12 points or something like that i don't need this color thing window here so i'm going to click that to get rid of it and that looks pretty good now to manipulate this i'm going to want to use my selection tool here this top one this little arrow at the top and i'm just going to reposition this and make sure it's in the right spot if i wanted to make it bigger or smaller i can of course drag the corners and make it look exactly like i want well a floating head isn't that interesting so i'm going to go back to my layers over here and let's give it something inside the body so i'm going to go ahead and click this new layer yet again i'm going to drag this into the body and i'm going to make a rectangle so i'm going to click on the shape again go to my rectangle tool and i'm just going to click and drag and make a rectangle for the basic torso for our character like that and again i can select it and manipulate it and move it if i want my character to be taller smaller all of that and i do want a little bit of overlap with the head and the body like this of course i could move this down and also you know make a neck if i wanted to something along those lines you have a little bit of flexibility but basically you want these two to be connected uh in some way so they're all kind of moving together as one piece of artwork and now let's finish out the rest of my character's skeleton with some basic limbs so i'm gonna go ahead and click the plus add a new layer here again and inside the body group i'm going to go ahead and add an arm and i'm going to kind of click and drag a really simple rectangle like this and if i wanted that to be a little bit more rounded i could actually go up here to the selection tool select it and these little circles that appear i can click and drag that to make it a nice round arm piece and put it right there so now i've got one arm i probably want my other arm to look the exact same so and be the same length so i'm going to take this go to edit copy so i selected my layer here i went to edit copy i'm going to create a new layer so this is arm is going to be pasted onto a completely new fresh layer and then go to edit paste and now it's going to show up in its own layer here and we're going to move that to the other side like that okay a few extra things i want to do with the arms number one the character right here is in what we would call a t-pose if you've ever seen in video games or 3d oil work a lot of times characters will be set in this kind of t basic pose but for character animator we found that you get the most flexibility uh with arm movements if you have your character in what we call an a pose so what i'm actually going to do is select one of these and i can on the corner here if my cursor goes by the corner i can get this little rotation icon and i'm just going to click and drag until i get about a 45 degree angle like that you can also hold down the shift key while you do this to snap to 45 degree angles and then i'm just gonna move this and drag it over so it overlaps with the character like that let's do the same for the other arm i'm going to find it i'm going to hold down shift while i drag to get a 45 degree angle like that and i'm going to move this over so it overlaps with the character again you want your artwork to show up over top of the other artwork you want it to be able to intersect and connect you don't want your arms out like this where they're disconnected then it's not going to work as well but you do have the option of do you want your arms in front of your torso or behind so here in the way i have it set up right now these arms are in front of the torso and so the shoulders where they connect are going to show up in front of the torso as well but if i wanted to take this torso and actually drag it above the arms like this now the arms are going to appear behind and it is going to hide the arms a little bit behind the torso so it's a artistic decision which you want um either works fine there are limitations though if i do it like this with the arms behind then later when my character moves their arms they're not going to show up in front of the torso so if i wanted my character like rubbing their tummy for example i'm not going to be able to do that because the arm is actually going to appear behind the torso instead as it drags in in front so think about what's going to work best for your character and you can experiment and play around with it i'm going to leave mine on the front because right now i think it's going to show the arm movement a little bit easier for the purposes of this tutorial but you'll notice that different puppets are set up in different ways so experiment and see what works best for you now i'm going to go ahead and rename each of these layers so i'm going to go to this layer 7 that i've created which is on the left side of my screen but actually is my character's right side right so if the character was looking at me i know that this is actually his or her right arm so i'm gonna go ahead and double click and call this plus right arm we'll talk about the pluses in a little bit don't worry about it too much now and then again with the left arm i'll double click and type in plus left arm like that all right let's finish things off with the legs so i'm going to go ahead and add one more new layer here and i'm going to use the rectangle yet again and drag right around here where a leg might be something like that and i'm also going to do the roundness thing to it like that but i also might want a little foot coming out of here as well and so with this layer still selected i'm going to go ahead and add another rectangle down at the bottom like this and that's going to be this character's foot so in illustrator notice that because i did this both on the same layer there's two parts here there's the bottom part and the main leg part in photoshop you would want this to be a group a little folder icon and put both of these parts inside the same group so since i want my other leg to most likely be the exact same length and type as this one i'm going to make sure my selection tool is selected up here i'm going to click and drag so i select both parts here and then i'll go to edit copy to copy those make a new layer and let's paste edit paste to bring it over now i want my character to kind of be a straight front view so i you could totally have the legs like this but i actually want mine to look like it's going the other way so you have a few options here i could click and drag on the side here to make it on you know reflect over and go like that or even easier i can go up to object transform reflect and it's automatically with vertical reflection gonna do like that and then i can just use the arrow keys hold down shift while clicking the arrow keys to make it a little bit longer make bigger jumps and then when i want to fine tune it just press the arrow keys a few times to make sure it's all lined up and there we go now i've got a basic outline of a character now i don't have to name all these different parts but i'm going to just because i find a little bit helpful to know what i'm dealing with when i'm in character animator rig mode so uh this leg right here this looks like it was the character's right leg so i'm going to double click and call this right leg uh this next one is the left leg so let's double click and call this left leg and then this the background here i'm just going to call this bg for background you don't want to call this head because then it can get mistagged as a second head and then you're gonna character emitter thinks your character has two heads and that's gonna lead to a lot of problems so the only thing in this whole setup that you have to name exactly correctly is this one right here head a-t-a-d as long as it's named that that's the information character animator needs to know to move with your own head movements in the webcam oh yeah i forgot about the torso down here so i'm just going to double click this and call this torso so my final grouping should look like this i've got a main group called puppet here and inside that i've got my head and body the head is just this circle for now and the body should have a bunch of different things inside of it but mainly the main things i want are plus right arm plus left arm and then these legs and torso again these don't have to be named exactly this this could be called plus tentacle or you know left claw or whatever if you're doing a robot character a monster character or something like that uh the names are not important here but we do recommend the pluses as i've put right here all right with that the basic setup is done so i'm gonna go ahead and save this character by going to file save and i'm gonna save it into place and name it something that i can easily find so i'm just gonna call this guy blue guy uh dot ai he's saved on my desktop and go ahead and click save and i want to make sure by the way he is an ai file that brings up these options all that looks good that's fine click ok ok so for the time being i am done with adobe illustrator and now i'm going to go ahead and open up character animator okay so i've opened up character animator and an important distinction to make here is that character animator actually has two modes we call it starter mode and pro mode and by default it is your first time using character animator you're going to be funneled into starter mode and starter mode is great for getting started with character animator you just select a character down here you are record your voice and head movements you add a few triggers and emotions and you've got a easy video but if you want to do anything deeper or more complicated than that including rigging your own custom character all of that happens inside pro mode so the best way to move between these different modes is up here this little workspace icon it should say starter by default and if i click on this i get the option to stay in starter mode or use pro mode so because i want to rig my own custom character i want to go to pro mode for this so i'm going to click use pro and that has taken me to the pro home page here and i can make sure that i'm there because it says pro up here in the upper right hand corner all right so we want to start with a blank new fresh project so i'm going to go over here to new project and click on that and again i can save this and call it whatever i want i'm just going to call this rig example and go ahead and click save and now i've got a blank project and it's completely open and ready for me to start bringing my character in hopefully you see your face up here and this audio meter moving if you don't refer to the intro to character animator video which will go through all the setup uh to fix that stuff if you need it so now let's import in the illustrator file that we created and see what happens so i'm going to go ahead over here and you can do one of two things you can either double click in the blank space in the project panel over here so double clicking here is going to bring up your file browser or you can go to file and import so on my desktop i see blueguy.ai right here and i'm going to go ahead and import that and what that does is import my puppet as an asset over here i could do this as many times as i want right i can add multiple characters backgrounds audio files whatever i want and it's going to show up here just like in premiere pro or after effects if you're familiar with those programs i my project panel is kind of where all my assets are that i'm going to use in character animator but a puppet by itself isn't going to really do anything we need to add it into a scene uh to have it actually be able to move around so the way i do that is i select my puppet puppets your actor actress and your scene is the the stage that they're actually set on so with my puppet selected i'm going to click this little clapboard icon down here add to new scene and there you go and now my guy is showing up here and rotating with my head movement now normally we don't float in the air like this and pivot uh from our neck so i need to rig a few things differently but overall i can tell that something is at least working here right something has started so now i need to jump into rig mode and that's where i'm going to add a certain functionality to this character to make it animate in the way that i want so the way i do that is i'm going to double click on my puppet over here blue guy and doing that switches me over to rig mode so i can switch between these different modes by going up here clicking record or clicking rig or i can double click on a scene to take me to record mode or double click on a puppet to take me into that puppet's rig mode all right so let's work on fixing that floating problem first we got to basically pin this guy's feet down to the ground and the way we want to do that is i'm going to select my body group here i don't want to select the legs i want to select the body group and i'm going to go down here to tools down below here and there's this one called the pin tool it looks like a little thumb tack a little push pin i'm going to click on that and i'm going to add one for each foot so i'm going to put a little pin there and a little pin here what is this doing exactly well it's creating a handle which are these little invisible data points that you can add to a character and you see that it's being tagged over here as fixed saying i want this to stay fixed to the ground so what i just did another way to do this just so you understand the rigging process a little bit better is i could take just a blank handle tool over here click it here and tag it as fixed it's the exact same thing that i just did the pushpin is just a little shortcut to be able to do that because it is a pretty common thing that you add into characters so either way works i'm just going to do this again a blank handle and tag it as fixed you could have as many tags as you want for a individual look and i've got an error because i'm doing something that isn't possible here but you can see that you can tag this as many tags as you want typically you're probably going to have one maybe two tags it's rare that you get you know more than that but right now i want to untag all of these and i can do that by clicking them here or clicking the little x that appears next to them and there we go okay so i've got two fixed handles down here let's see what that looks like with just that in record mode okay so that solved one problem it looks like the feet are tagged to the ground but now my arms are flying off um and that's not looking too good also my character is not really fitting in the scene as well as i want so i can adjust that as well if i single click my scene here to select it notice over here on the right hand side i get things like frame rate width and height so if i wanted to change this to you know a vertical uh format or wider or a square or whatever i want i have the ability to do that i can just type in you know whatever value i want here 5000 let's say and you'll see it gets as big and it's going to recenter the character there so i could do whatever i want with that i'm going to undo that i can also change the frame rate so right now it's at 24 frames per second which is a pretty typical uh animation frame rate if i wanted to be a little bit more uh choppy i could change it to 12 frames per second this is more like what you might find in like a stop-motion style video so if you're going for that look you could do that but i could make this 60 if i wanted to you know and then i'm running at a full 60 frames per second and i've seen a lot more animators on social media and youtube using the 60fps look and it's a really nice smooth look as well so you've got a ton of options here do what works for you but honestly this none of this is affecting the character itself this is just the scene so anything i do here is not going to be saved as part of the puppet it's only going to be saved as this instance of the puppet in this scene right here well with my current settings of 1920x1080 a pretty typical hd setup my character's head is going off the screen and the legs are down below as well i want to reposition my character and the way i would do that is select my character down here in the timeline you can use this later for recording uh performance but i'm just going to select the character here and then by default one thing over here we call these behaviors these are kind of the rules of the character we'll get into them a little bit later transform is showing me all this different information so if i wanted to scale my character up and down i could do that by dragging over scale i can drag over the position x and y um i can rotate my character all that stuff whatever i want change the opacity of it all of those things if i want to reset back to the defaults just click the x next to any value that you've changed and it'll go back to whatever the default was so to fit this character a little bit better i'm going to scale him down a little bit like that and maybe i position him just slightly down and that looks pretty good so i'm pretty happy with how this puppet is looking right now but i still have that issue of the arms coming off so let's go see if i can fix that back in rig mode so i'm going to go ahead and click on rig again so in basic terms what's happening here is the arm thinks that this is where it's pivoting from this is its origin point so the arm thinks that it's going to rotate from around where the elbow is and by default the origin is always going to go in the middle of whatever artwork you have so that makes sense and then it thinks that it's connected to whatever is moving around and controlling it in this case that's the body up here and you'll see the body's origin is right here so this little dotted line circle is the origin of the character so check this out if i move the origin i'm just using the selection tool right down here this little arrow to move this body around if i move it up here and now go to my arm well look the arm thinks it's now connected to here but instead i want the arm to actually pivot from the shoulder right that's where arms normally move and pivot from when they're rotating around or waving or moving or swinging or whatever so what i'm going to do is take the origin of the right arm and drag it until it intersects with the rest of the character and notice as soon as i do that the character turns green and it's saying this is a valid connection point basically and when it says let go now this arm is basically connected to this character the reason this is showing up is because it has a independent crown next to it and you'll notice these crowns are only showing up for the layers that we added the plus two in our illustrator file and so that is the secret code uh that you add to a layer to add an uh a crown next to it now you don't have to do this i can add a crown to any group or layer that i want it's not a big deal but it just makes your life a little bit easier when you're thinking about structuring your puppet which parts you want to be independent i'm going to talk about independence a little bit later and illustrate it in a better way right now just trust me we want this to be independent okay so let's do the exact same thing for the left arm so i've got my left arm here i want to drag the origin until it connects to the character and we'll do it like that okay let's go back to record mode and now i've solved most of my major problems right the character is moving around as i would expect the head isn't coming off the body isn't rotating and the arms are staying stuck to the torso so with just those few steps just moving two origins and adding two fixed handles i've now set up my character to work pretty well but this is going to be a pretty boring character if this is all it can do is just move its head around and that's it i want to add the ability to move the arms around a little bit right and drag them around and have them wave have them stay on the hips all of that stuff when i talk i use my arms a lot i want my character to be able to do the same let's go into rig mode and rig the arms for movement all right so i'm going to go ahead and select my right arm group here and i'm going to go down to my tools and select this one that looks like a little compass this is the dragger tool and with that selected and with my arm selected i'm going to go down to where the hands would normally be and just click right there and that's going to add a draggable tagged handle so just like we did at the fixed handle this is a shortcut to make something draggable uh and i can do the same thing with the left arm let's do it the other way where i would just select the handle tool put it here and tag it as draggable so that is also tagged as draggable and if i click the mouse wheel i can click and drag to move around and see this a little bit better you can also use the pan tool down here to do the same thing you also have zoom controls as well as the selection tool that i've been using and a zoom tool here all right so now i've added two more handles let's go back to record mode and now my character basically looks the same but there's one difference if i click and drag around a hand i'm going to get some movement and now i can drag the character and pose it however i want and it's going to follow my mouse movements okay so that's a great step forward but these arms are not looking that great uh they kind of look like spaghetti and i want them to be a little bit have a little bit more structure right we've got bones we got our forearm our bicep here i want to give my character a little bit more structure so let's jump back into rig mode and there's yet another tool down here now this is a unique tool this is one that you can't use one of these others and just tag it you actually have to use this and it's called the stick tool sticks are basically just a way to make your character's parts a little bit more rigid uh so imagine like you imagine this is like just a sheet of paper and you are adding uh you know toothpicks to tell where it can and can't bend so what i'm going to do is drag and kind of create these bones for where the bicep and the forearm would be so with my arm group selected i'm going to click and drag and make a stick that goes right about to the elbow i'm going to stop and leave a little room for the elbow bend and then click and drag again and make my forearms stick let's do the same thing for the right arm click and drag leave a gap and click and drag all right so now let's go to record mode and see how that looks so now when i drag my arms you'll see i actually get a realistic bend where that elbow would be and this is looking significantly better than what i had previously so this is already a good start now notice that the arm where the shoulder is connected there's a little bit of a bending there you see and depending on if you uh put your arm in front or behind your torso you're going to you can kind of hide that effect or you're going to see it a little bit more prominently you could be okay with that it's fine if you like how it looks but you also have another option of how things attach to each other so yet again let's jump back into rig mode and if i select my arm there's a bunch of different options over here but the one i want to care about right now is attach style and by default when you attach something that is when this origin intercepts intersects over something else uh you're going to get let me select my arm again you're going to get weld as the as the default but i also have a few different options free is just going to be completely free and that's not what i want because now when i drag it it's going to completely come off if you have a robot that like shoots an arm off that's great but for 99 of characters that's not what you want so let's not do that but you could try hinge mode instead hinge mode is more like a helicopter blade right it's going to kind of move around and pivot and rotate um like like it's like a propeller blade instead and so you don't get the bend here like you would get with the weld it's a personal preference thing and depending on your character one might work better than the other so play around with it and see what works best for you and your artwork so now i've got a really basic setup i can move my head around i can pose my arms they've got good elbow bends there um this is kind of the basic skeleton of my character so now let's start building and adding on top of this basic structure and let's start with the face i'm going to start with the eyes and the eyebrows uh to give it a little bit of extra emotion and movement the eyes are one of the most important parts of a character and we want to make sure that they're as expressive as possible and we also want them to follow our own pupil movements in the webcam so let's go back into the illustrator file and you might have that open still but in case you don't or you forgot where you saved it or whatever you can always select your puppet up here and when you do that in the project panel you'll see there's a little symbol that appears here if this is an ai file the illustrator icon is going to show up it's a photoshop file psd file the ps photoshop icon is going to show up so if i have this guy selected and i click ai that is going to open up that original file that it's looking at and referencing all right so i'm going to zoom into my head here i'm going to use uh option on mac or alt on pc and my scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in a little bit here and then i'm going to click my mouse wheel and do something like that to re-center it like that you can also use the space bar and left-click to do that as well all right so let's go ahead and then my first eye so i'm going to select my bg layer that's inside my head and add a new layer that goes on top of it and let's just use again a simple circle lips tool and white and black looks pretty good to me i do want this to be a white pupil with a black outline and i'm just going to click and drag and make something like that looks pretty good now it looks like it forgot my stroke how big that was so i'm going to go back to my properties here and click the stroke until it has a similar line weight it doesn't have to be the exact same but let's say something like 10 looks pretty good to me now inside that eye i want a pupil so i'm going to go ahead and add a new layer that's going to be over top of that still on the on the ellipse tool and i'm going to click and drag and make a pupil like that now for my character's pupil i actually don't want a stroke so i'm going to click the stroke and then click this little no none symbol down here which is going to remove the stroke and instead i can just double click and then make this pupil whatever color i want i'm just going to make it black so it's really easy for us to see but of course you could do it uh whatever color you want now in general you want your pupil to be smaller than your eyeball right so i don't want my people to be so big like this um because then the the way that this works is that the pupil is going to move around inside the eyeball and if i make it too big it's not going to have enough room to move around and it's going to kind of bump up against the edges there are some ways around that with clipping masks and some other techniques that we can talk about later but for now let's just keep it really simple and keep it right in the middle of this circle here so inside my head now i have my background i have this eyeball layer and i have this pupil layer as well i want to do one more fit thing for this eye and that is add a blink state uh so when my character blinks i want to show what that looks like and i can make it as simple as just a really simple line so what i'm going to do is add one more layer here and go to the rectangle tool and i'm just going to click and drag like this right across the middle of both of my circles something like that and so what's going to happen is if i uh turn off the visibility for my eyeball and my pupil this is what it's going to look like when the character blinks it's going to hide both of these two things and show that instead for the time being i can turn this off so it doesn't look weird whoops this line and there we go okay so i've got three different layers the eyeball the pupil and the blank and i want to put them all inside in eye container so i'm going to create one more layer here this would be a group in photoshop and i'm just going to double click and we're going to call this plus right eye because again this is on the character's right side of the face and then i'm going to shift select these three things these three elements and drag them into my right eye so now i have this group the right eye that is going to have all three of these things inside of it so these things need very particular names for character animator to do the auto tagging for them and tell tell them exactly what these things should be doing if i just call this you know white and uh you know middle and um just blink these aren't going to work because character emitter doesn't know what these are it doesn't know that middle is a pupil and it should track your own pupil movements so i can make my life a little bit easier by calling this right eyeball this one plus right pupil and let me move this out a little bit so you can see a little bit better there we go and this one right blink so when i bring these in character mater is going to understand okay the eyeball that's the bounding box basically of where the people can go the pupil it's independent it's going to move on its own and it's the thing that's going to show up in the middle and the right blink is going to show up whenever i blink my eyes in the webcam so let's go ahead and save this character you don't want to save as you don't want to save a copy you need to save over the reference file that you've already a character emitter is always already connected to and let's bring this cyclops character into a character emitter and see what happens so already i can see that i have a working eye it's just one eye but it's already working well so i can see as i move around with my pupils and as i blink the character is doing exactly that so this immediately feels like it already has a little bit more life right we had this lifeless blue character without any facial features but now i've got this nice eye staring back at me and the character already feels a little bit more friendly and approachable and uh interesting let's give him another eye and see what happens so let's go back to the illustrator file okay so i probably want my left eye to look exactly the same as my right eye so i'm going to turn the blink on temporarily here just so all the contents are visible and i make sure that i'm copying everything over because you would hate to copy just the pupil and eyeball over but you forget the blank and then i'm going to select this eye group here and i'm going to hold down option on mac or alt on pc and click and drag and move it so the line is above the right eye or below it really doesn't matter and let go and that's going to make a copy of it so again i selected my group here i held down option on mac or alt on pc click and drag above and now i've got a copy i'm going to press shift and the right arrow just to move it over a little bit and then let go of shift and do some more fine-tuning like that and now i've got my copied eye that's looking pretty good now we don't want to leave this called right eye copy let's double click this delete the copy part and we're going to call this left eye like that and let's twirl it open and we also want to change the same thing here where i call this left blink basically we're getting rid of all the copies and we are changing all the directions to left instead of right and at this point i can turn those blinks back off so i can see my eyes a little bit better so before we go back to character animator let's do one more thing let's add some eyebrows to my character as well so i'm going to select whatever eye is on top here and click the plus uh i button down here to add one more new layer and i'm just going to create a rectangle above one of the eyes let's just do it like this and that looks pretty good i'm going to direct put it a little bit over here and i'm going to rename this to plus right eyebrow okay and now to make my left eyebrow i'm going to select this copy it edit copy make a new layer paste it in edit paste and bring that up here so it's aligned with the other eyebrow and we're going to name this one plus left eyebrow okay before we go back to character animator just take a look and make sure everything's spelled correctly and is working the right way so i see my plus left eyebrow plus right eyebrow plus left eye with left blink plus left pupil and left eyeball inside and plus right eye right blink plus right people and right eyeball inside if all of this looks good all of these are named correctly then you're good to go let's save and let's move back to character animator alright so now i've got a character that is staring back right at me and it's blinking it's moving around with the eyes and the eyebrows are also moving up and down as well to make sure your movement is uh calibrated with your character you want to look at your character uh in in the webcam center yourself and then click this little calibrate button here and that's going to kind of re-center the character so if i wanted to start from over here for example i click calibrate and now that's my new center position or if i want to do this and this is where i want to start from click calibrate it's just a simple thing to make sure you're getting the right results for your character now even at this early stage i have some control over how much my character is moving based on my own movements in the webcam so let's start with eye gaze for example i'm going to twirl this open down here these are our behaviors these are rules for how our character should animate and eye gaze is going to control how the eyes move right so i noticed the camera strength is set to a hundred percent by default that means when my pupils are moving the pupils for the character are going to move 100 of the way to the edges of the eyeball now in this case i might want him not to move all the way so let's try changing this to something like 50 and now look what's happening the pupils are still moving but they're not going all the way to the edges of the eyeball um so you can kind of fine tune that performance as as much as you want to have it move as much as you want or not as little as you want now i can of course make this really big and then the pupils are going to come completely out of the eyes and nobody wants that so let's change it back here are a few other options snap eye gaze this is going to mean that the eyes are going to snap either in the center or up down left right or diagonal if i turn this off the eyes are going to be a little bit more jittery and try to move with my pupils in a more one-to-one fashion this is not typically how 2d animation looks and how pupils move around so snap eye case is by default but it just shows you have an option there same with minimum snap duration this means every one second it's going to check and see if the pupils are in a new position but if that feels too slow or too fast you can actually change this to be you know whatever you want and i can even do half a second if i wanted to as well 0.5 so that's going to make the pupils move a lot more again if i want to switch any of these back to their defaults i just click the little x there and that's going to change it back to whatever i started out with okay so let's twirl that up and move into face now i've got more control over the face as well um and one of the biggest ones you're going to fool around with is head position strength actually head position strength and head head tilt strength are two big ones that they almost always change for a character so head position is going to change how much the character's head moves with your own head movements so i move this up to 224 percent and then it's moving quite a lot it was at 100 if i move this even smaller let's say 50 now the head isn't going to move left and right up and down as much for this character so i've got full control over that same thing with tilt strength so i've got 75 here if i turn this way up then the character is going to do all sorts of crazy gymnastics to move around um and i like that amount to tilt at just 75 but i could make it more subtle if i wanted to have not as much tilt back and forth for the character one parameter i almost always changed is this one here head scale strength this is set to 25 by default and that just means as i get closer or further away from the camera the head is going to change its shape as well so if i change this to really high up you can get a really inflated head like that or really small one to me this typically doesn't look good unless you're like a floating character like a bird or something that you want to fly in and out and close to the screen or a ghost um so for me i'm gonna leave this at zero and honestly for 99 of my characters i set this to zero and that's how it is i also have eyebrow strength so how much is how much are my eyebrows moving up and down this is set to 75 by default but if i want it to be higher or lower i can do that as well to get some extra expressiveness and i can also change uh what tilt how far i'm going to allow my eyebrows to tilt up and down so if i want a really like surprised character maybe i'm going to let's set the eyebrow strength back to 75 but let's change the raised eyebrow strength to not 20 but like 66 and now it's going to pivot up more and i can keep going you know as high as i want until it like flips around and that's not going to look good but you get the idea you have control over how angry or how surprised your character can be through your own eyebrow movements move eyebrows together is a fun one because if you uncheck this now your eyebrows are going to move independently and if you're really good with eyebrow you know control which i'm not that great at but you can kind of see how i'm kind of doing like a confused look right here the eyebrows are moving one at a time so you do have that as an option um typically i feel like this can look a little more jittery if you have this turned on by default so i typically have it turned on but sometimes if i'm doing same live or having fun with it i'll turn it off so this is a general rule about all these behaviors there is no one right answer to what these numbers are we give you our best guess as a default hey maybe the head position strength should be 100 head scale should be 25 but it is totally up to you and your character and your artwork what all of these parameters are so with any character i make i go through all of these behaviors and try different things and see what works and you can just experiment and have fun because remember you can always just click the x to reset back to the original values so there's really no harm you're not hurting your original puppet file you're just playing around with this instance of the puppet in this scene so our puppet's looking pretty good so far the eyes are being very expressive i've done the details and the head movements to exactly what i want but now we want our character to talk we probably want to fill in the rest of the face so let's add a nose and mouth and let's go back to our original illustrator file so again the way i'm going to do that is select my blue guy puppet over here and click the ai icon all right so making a nose is really easy i'm just going to make a new layer and i'm going to make sure this layer is inside my head group and i want to make sure it's not like inside my eye group or anything like that because then when i blink it's actually going to make my nose disappear so you never want things in your eye group that don't belong there so keep your eyes you know groups twirled up like that and it should be a little easier to move around um but otherwise you know up here is fine and i'm just going to name this plus nose and then it's automatically going to be added and tagged as a independent nose now this is not a hundred percent critical uh the nose isn't used in that many behaviors uh it's used for a little bit of parallax and things like that so you could call this whatever you want honestly but um just to give yourself the most flexibility later on i would call this plus nose and then you can make this you know whatever you want you could you know use your shapes again and make a rectangle an ellipse whatever you want polygon um for this i'm actually going to use the pin tool up here which is a really common tool that i use all the time for illustrator artwork in particular which is just going to allow me to click and make a freehand shape so i'm just going to make a quick triangle this way by clicking and then clicking down here click again and click one more time to close the shape and now i've got a nose shape that's appearing in my plus nose layer i probably want this to be a different color inside so i'm going to select it and probably go with like an orange or some other complementary color to the blue so maybe something like that and then let's move this in over here i don't want to have the duck beak so i'm going to make that a little bit smaller and do something like that and there you have it there's your nose so now we're ready to move on to what i think is the most complicated part of rigging a puppet and that's the mouth shape so i'm going to show you the hard way to do it and then i'm going to show you an easier way to do it so let's start with the hard way if i was rigging this from scratch the way i would do it is basically create a bunch of new layers and i'm going to put everything in a plus mouth group and then i'll just start to put these layers inside here and the very first mouth i want is a neutral i'm going to tag it call it neutral so both of these are going to get automatically tagged when they come into character animator the mouth and neutral so this is what i want my character to show uh up when they are not speaking whatever their basic default mouse should look like so i'm just going to make a really simple i'm going to use the line tool over here line segment tool and i'm just going to click and drag like that and that is my neutral mouth so if my character isn't talking isn't saying anything that's what's going to show up i might move it a little bit further up like that so now i'm going to work on a more open mouth shape so i'm actually going to take this neutral and lock it and use that kind of as a guide for my other mouse so i'm going to select this next layer below it and i'm just going to click again with the pen tool across like this and maybe make it open like this something very simple like that and then let's also take the color and make it filled inside okay so now if i go over here i can see that's my neutral mouth and that's my open mouth now i know from using character animator for several years now that i would want this to be called a a and then that's automatically going to get tagged as an ah mouth and then let's just make one more uh here so i'm actually going to hide this a mouth here and i'm just going to do one more and i'm going to call this o o h and i'm going to make in here just a really simple circle using the ellipse tool and going right around where the center is or a little bit to the side so i have some room to move around and we'll make this the o mouth like this okay so now uh if he was saying oh that's what his mouth would look like if he was neutral he'd be like that and if he's saying ah he'd go like that so with just these three mouths let's save this and bring it into character animator and see what happens okay so what i notice is if my blue microphone icon is on over here and i'm seeing a green signal show up then when i say certain words this character is going to react to them now it's not doing a lot right now because i haven't filled in all the mouse shapes but if i say like o k you'll notice that it's showing me the two mouse right o k and so it knows those are the particular symbols that it's looking for so if i go to rig mode and i select any group or layer let's just select my mouth group right now and i can see over here this has automatically been tagged as a mouth just like i want i'll notice on the right hand side here these are all the possible mouth shapes i could create so right now let's twirl up in this mouth i only have neutral which gets illuminated over here ah which gets illuminated here and o down here but i could also draw and add all these additional mouth shapes as well an m shape for m sounds so all of these i can do you know however i want and there's some basic guides for you know if you look at the icons here what these mouse shapes might traditionally look like so an s or a d sound is more clinched teeth looking the m is very similar to neutral usually it's drawn a little bit smaller and puckered in a little bit and then these o and r and woo are kind of these rounded ones and then f and l are more kind of in-between ones that they kind of show up uh usually uh in small bursts uh before they're not you know typically held they're kind of used to transition between some of these other visions but f is more shown as like a biting lip here or biting the top of the lip and l has kind of a curved tongue um against the teeth so i could draw all of these and name them appropriately so i could in my original illustrator file also add inside my mouth group another layer called m in another layer called s and another called d and so on and so forth and eventually you would have your full complete mouse set and you can make it look exactly like you want so if your character has fangs you know the way that that shows up or the way their tongue moves or uh whatever you know sort of special you know treatment you want to give to your character you can use this as a guide and make whatever you want i should note that there are two additional mouse shapes down here called smile and surprise and these basically are like neutral these will show up only if nothing is being said but they'll also only show up if you're doing this in the webcam so if i smile in the webcam and i have something in my mouth group tagged to smile then that is the mouth that's going to show up as long as i'm not saying anything same with surprised if i then open my mouth in the webcam and nothing's being said it will show this personally i don't use these that much because i find i will accidentally trigger them a lot when i don't mean to and it can lead to kind of inconsistent results so instead i will do triggered mouths which we can talk about a little bit later so i personally leave these off but these are an option if you want to add some additional expressiveness to your live character so if you want to do that sort of thing you can absolutely take the time to do it but for me i started out not knowing how to do this stuff at all and the way i started with mouse shapes was taking a mouth set from a different character or from a mouth template photoshop or illustrator file and then bringing it into my character and then i used that as a starting point that i could manipulate to fit my character or the style a little bit more so if the you know the teeth i wanted to do a little bit same different to that or the color of the tongue wasn't in the same palette of my character i could make small modifications here and there to have it fit my character's style a little bit more but honestly i think if you are just starting out uh taking a mouth from another character is probably the best place to start so i'm gonna go back to the home screen here in character animator and i'm just going to click on there's this character chad right here this is a really really simple character um for photoshop and illustrator versions so if you were using photoshop i would click on photoshop but for me i'm using illustrator so i'm going to go ahead and click on the text that says chad illustrator and what that's going to do is give me this disembodied head character called chad who is just a really simple face but notice he's got a full mouth set that's moving with every single syllable and thing i say so i'm going to take his mouse set out of his file and add it to my own character so you'll notice the project panel got a little more crowded now because now i don't just have my blue guy puppet in scene but i have my chad puppet in scene as well so if i select my chad puppet here and then click on the ai icon so now i've got my original chad artwork here and i can see that if i twirl open his mouth group he has a mouth for every single one of these shapes including smile and surprise at the bottom here so what i can do is uh first let's go back to my blue guy and i'm just going to get rid of this mouth that i you know was playing around with i don't need that anymore so i just selected and pressed the trashcan down here to delete it and now i'm going to go back to chad and the way you do this in illustrator it's way easier in photoshop you can actually just take this group that the mouth is in and just drag it into your tab up here if you have two tabs comps and it's just going to show up and then you can just click and drop it wherever you want whatever reason you can't do that in illustrator yet so the way you would do that in illustrator is with this mouse selected i want to turn the visibility on for all of these mouse so it's going to look a little weird right now but trust me this is going to make sense this is how we want to bring it over and then i'm going to select this little circle that appears next to my mouth group over here i'm going to select that you'll notice what that does is it's gonna select every mouse shape uh that this character has so all the things in the mouth over here and then i'm gonna go to edit copy so now i've copied all those mouse in that group so once that's copied i can go over to my blue guy and i want to make sure the head group is selected here i wanted to go inside the head and then edit paste and you'll see that has now added a plus mouth group with all of these different shapes inside so i am probably not going to have the right sizing right this mouth is way too big for this character so i'm just going to hold on the corner i'm going to hold down shift while i drag to make sure it's going proportionately uh correctly and it's not bending or warping in any way and we'll do something like this looks pretty good and then once it's all in now i can turn off the visibility for all those additional mouse that i don't care about and now i have a very basic mouth so here's the cool thing is you can do this with any character so i showed you with this chad character but if you find another character animator character that you really like the way their mouth looks you can do the exact same thing i just showed uh to them uh as long as their mouth doesn't have sometimes they also include skin tones or some of them have like a beard that they might attach to the mouth to have it move around but i would say 90 of the puppets out there are gonna have their own kind of isolated mouth set and so you can do what i just did i find the mouth i uh select it i turned everything on copy it and then paste it into your thing and you know i might make some adjustments here this stroke for example in this mouth is a little thinner than the stroke that i'm using elsewhere so i might play around with it make some refinements of my own but overall i really like how this is looking and this saved me a ton of time if i had tried to make all of these mouth shapes i think there's 14 of them here from scratch that would have taken me you know at least a couple of hours and it wouldn't have looked as good because i don't know what i'm doing with a basic lip sync so um i think this is a great place to start and this is where i always recommend particularly for beginner users to start with the mouth so with all that being said let us save this and go back to character animator so now when i talk my character is actually gonna look like it's talking back to me uh and that looks really nice this is looking a lot more responsive already than those terrible you know two or three mouse that i was trying to draw uh by myself so this is working really well now there's one special thing about chad's mouth set and you might see this with other characters so i'm going to walk through it here as well let's go to rig mode and look at the mouse in particular there's three mouths here that seem to have multiple parts to them multiple frames to them and that is well the way that this works basically is the eye mouth let me turn off neutral and just show you ah and let's zoom in a little bit here the on mouth actually has two frames to it see there's this ah and it goes one and then it drops down a little bit too so this is actually the artist who originally created these made a little frame by frame animation and says anytime you see an ah mouse shape i want it to start here and then open up slightly to give it a little bit of extra fluidity so it's not just swapping out static artwork it's adding a little bit of frame by frame animation into the mix and this is something in character animator we call cycle layers so what i'm going to do is uh with my eye mouth uh i could turn that off and now have my neutral only showing but with my eye mouth selected i'm going to go down here and on the bottom on the right here it says behaviors and i can actually add a behavior to any uh group or layer that i want to here so in this case i've got my ah mouse selected and then i click the plus down here and i can select and add a new behavior to it in this case the behavior i want to add is um is cycle layers so i'm going to select that and cycle layers is going to do exactly what it's saying here i want to cycle between different layers it's going to move between the different layers here so this only has two frames this is the simplest possible cycle layers we have but what i want to happen well when it's triggered yes when someone starts speaking and says the ah shape this is what i want to appear top to bottom in this case it is dropping correctly one and two but if i had accidentally done it the wrong way or the artist did it separately i could do bottom to top to make sure it's triggering the right way advance every one frame this is typically gonna look the best but if you want it to be a little chunkier i could do two three whatever i want um to make that a little bit shorter but vizim's mouth shapes just move so fast that you probably want to keep this to a low number i do want this to only cycle once so that's fine but it could make it continuously if i had something i wanted to like loop over and over again basically um and i do want it in the case of mouse i think it looks best to hold on the last layer uh that's just going to let it if i held that a sound it's going to stay there as opposed to trying to switch or go back to whatever the next mouth is and these other parameters i can just leave like they are okay so that was for the ah shape but this is also true of uh and woo so what i can do is actually select this and see this column where this little brick shows up that means that the ah shape now has a behavior associated with it um and if i select this i can see yes if i scroll down here's the behavior so now i can do the same thing let's select uh and i'm gonna do a shortcut instead of going down here to press the plus button i'm gonna go over here and press the plus that appears in the behavior column and i'm just gonna add cycle layers this way and let's do the exact same thing when trigger top to bottom once is good and i'm just going to select click hold on last layer and i'll do the same for woo let's do a plus here cycle layers go down here make sure it's hold on last layer okay let's go back to record mode and see if this looks any better so it's a pretty subtle thing uh to see but as i'm talking ah did you see that how it kind of drops down just a little bit it's the woo mouth for example is showing multiple frames of the o uh moving and then the ah is dropping that jaw same with the uh sound is also dropping the jaw very subtle very subtle but it is nice because the mouth it just adds a little bit of additional fluidity to the mouth shape so if you can find places to add this sort of thing in if you're making custom out shapes i think it is totally worth it because it's really going to add to that believability of the lip sync so i feel like with the additions to the face i've got a much more believable character right now right now the eyes and the mouth and the eyebrows and all that tracking it's adding a lot more personality to this character already so let's take a second to dig into that concept of independence that i've talked a lot about before remember that's the little crown icon that is appearing on different things in rig mode so let's try turning independence off on a few things and see what happens so back in rig mode i'm going to do a few things i'm going to turn the left eyebrow independence off i'm going to toggle that off by removing selecting it and clicking the crown icon and then for the right arm i'm going to remove independence from that as well so these seem like like why would this hurt anything why should these things move on their own they're connected to the body it really doesn't make sense well let's see what happens okay so immediately i noticed that as i'm moving my eyebrow notice that the whole head is kind of moving up and down and that is because the because the eyebrow is not independent because i didn't say it needs to move on its own it is actually pulling the rest of the head with its motion probably not something we want to do right and with the arm so this left arm over here for the character is looking fine it's it's doing exactly what i like i would expect but the right arm is pulling the rest of the character with it and you get some really weird looks doing this sort of thing so the basic rule of thumb is anytime your character is bending or warping in weird ways it is probably an independence issue it probably means something needs to be independent that is not independent and that is influencing the motion so heading back into rig mode let's fix this by adding independence to the right arm and independence to the left eyebrow but it is also true that you can kind of overdo your independence right so if i made the head independent for example up here so all these things are independent now now let's see what happens well now my head is completely uh separated from the rest of my body because i decided to make it independent and not connected so again i'm going to turn that off this is really easy to just play around with and see if it helps or hurts your character this is not set in stone remember if you added the plus in the layer name when you first started out the puppet it's going to automatically add one of these and that could be a nice helpful um you know shortcut to some of this stuff but ultimately it's in your your control in character animator if different elements are independent or not um and then another example be the pupil right you don't want the pupil dragging on the rest of the eye you want it to be able to move on its own so just think about that as you're creating your character and if you do run into those situations where things are warping or bending just go ahead and try adding independence and see if it helps so while we're on the subject of fixing issues i've noticed that if i drag the arms the elbows and everything are looking good but i do run into some issues like when for example i can drag this as far out as i want and that doesn't look that great as cartoon characters you know we can kind of exaggerate movements but if this was not a just blue if this had like a checkered pattern on it this would look terrible because it's just going to stretch for a really long time secondly i don't have as much control over the elbows as i want notice like when i bend in here i can get into some really weird positions for this character and i wish the elbow would just automatically bend a little bit more naturally well that's where a concept called inverse kinematics comes in and this is a really easy fix that we can add to our character to make that limb movement just a little bit more natural and believable so for inverse kinematics for a character animator let's go and select this top level character up here and this is where all my main behaviors are stored these are kind of the ones that you get but for free by default when you import a puppet we just automatically add all these behaviors because we think your puppet probably wants to have eyes probably has a face probably wants to stay fixed to the ground have lip sync have physics all that stuff um these are just things that we add in for free but you can always add more just like we did with um the uh the cycle layers for the mouth shapes i could do the same thing for additional behaviors for my top level character so again with this blue guy selected up here this is a selectable icon or a selectable area of the puppet i can go ahead and click on the plus and and also add in lim ik so this is going to add a bunch of stuff here to limited we don't have to worry about any of this stuff right now but what we do need to think about is look at the arm for lim ik to understand what's happening with this arm it needs to know some details it basically needs to know where the shoulder is where the elbow is and where the wrist is and if it has those three data points of information it's going to be able to do those elbow bins and stop the stretching just like we want so i'm going to start with my draggable handle that i created over here i'm going to select that making sure my selection tool is down here and select the draggable and in addition to draggable i'm also going to tag this over here as a right wrist okay and then i want to show where the elbow is so remember to do that i need another invisible data point so i'm going to go down to my handle tool down here and i'm going to click right in between my two sticks and i'm going to tag that as the right elbow and then the last thing i'm going to do um typically for lemi k we actually say to do this on the body group instead of the arm itself uh and that just helps prevent some issues uh a little bit later on so if i go to the body group i can actually see this green dot showing up where the arm has connected to the body because remember when i started my right arm i moved where i wanted this green thing to be and if i moved it down here if i selected body you would see the green dot shows up down here but in this case i want it to be attached to right where the shoulder blade would be up there and now when i select the body i'm just going to put another handle right there and i'm going to tag that as the right shoulder okay so in my right arm i've got right wrist and draggable down here right elbow in the middle and then on the body group i have right shoulder tags here let's do the same thing for the left arm this should go a little quicker so i see my wrist is already draggable over here i'm going to also tag it as a left wrist then i'm going to add another handle here and tag this left elbow and again go to the body find where that green attach point dot is click there and add the left shoulder and now when i drag the arm around notice that it's really hard to get into those weird positions with the arm as i did before the arm is kind of auto correcting itself to say where that bend is going to happen um and so this just makes the arm movements a little bit more natural as well as the stretching if i try to stretch this i can't stretch it uh further than i want it to go and so it's going to lead to again some more believability for the arms so limit k is something i add to every single character that i've ever made um once since it has been implemented because it just adds an extra degree of something i don't have to worry about the elbows looking weird or an arm stretching too far now you do have some parameters you can play around with here if i twirl open the limb ik behavior like the stretchiness if i want a little more stretchiness i can set this to you know maybe 47 and then it'll stretch a little bit but not as much as it would have before by default this is set to 10 to give it a little bit of stretch but if i want zero stretch i can set it to zero and then there's going to be absolutely no arm stretching whatsoever another one i really like is a elbow flip threshold so this is going to determine where the elbow transitions from going one way to the other so let's say i want the elbow to you know right around here is where i want it to start going um a different way so i can put my arms in that position and then click and drag over this little dial and notice that at a certain point the arms are going to go in a different direction and now that's going to be my new transition point for when the arms switch to the elbows switch to a different direction and i can see that a little bit clearer if i do it like this so play around with it again each character is going to be a little bit different of what parameters you have here but the default should work pretty well and then you can kind of build up from there so jumping back into illustrator the last concept that i want to cover with this character is the idea of triggers simply put triggers are just a way to create custom artwork and then decide when you're performing in character animator when to show or hide or swap in that artwork at any given time now we've already seen triggers in kind of an automatic fashion with this character right for example the blink states right when i blink uh it automatically hides the pupil and the eye eyeball and it's showing me this blink instead same thing with the mouth when i say certain words it's going between all these different mouse shapes and triggering the correct mouth now those are more automatic ones that are defined by the webcam or what i'm saying uh in the microphone but we can actually create our own custom triggers as well and then we can uh bind that to a key or a button so we can press that to automatically change things whenever we want and that gives us a lot of control and a possibility for additional emotion for the character so let's start with a really simple trigger um i'm just going to have this character have the ability to add glasses to his face if you want so i'm going to add the new new layer button here i'm going to make sure it's inside the head group and i'm going to try to put it above everything else because i don't want like the eyes going in front of the glasses and then i'm going to go over here i'm actually going to pick the rectangle tool for my frames and i'm going to do something like this now that doesn't look that great right now so i actually want to select my fill and go to none for that and then i can select my stroke and do whatever color frame i want um i might do something like similar to the orange of the nose let's see how that looks something like that okay it doesn't look great but it's uh it's it's at least showing off different from the skin and the rest of the body and then i'm going to curve this a little bit to give it a frame a little bit of a rounded corner and i'm just going to move this over and then i'm going to copy and let's paste in place that's going to put it in the same place and i'm just going to use shift in the arrow keys to move this over and make the frame cover the other eye and then i'm just going to use the rectangle tool here just to make some actually you know what let's use the line tool instead that's going to be better and i'm just going to click and drag like that and click and drag like that okay so now i've got this goofy looking layer uh here that is glasses and i'm just going to call this glasses let's save and see what happens in character animator okay so yeah as expected when i come back to character animator the artwork that i just saved is now showing up on my character's face but maybe i don't want his glasses on all the time maybe he only had needs his glasses for reading or for long distance viewing or something like that and i want him to be able to show or hide those glasses at any time so let's jump into rig mode and you'll notice there's this panel down here called triggers and it says drop layers replays or audio here to create triggers so if i want to create a trigger from these glasses it's really easy i just select it and i drag it into this triggers area and now it shows up as a trigger so i've got my trigger name here i've got a little icon that shows that it's a trigger and then in this little box over here i can type in any alphanumeric key that i want so let's just do a g for glasses and press enter and now this trigger is bound to the g key doing this and making this a trigger is suddenly changed everything now these glasses aren't actually going to show up by default even though i'm seeing them here and i can turn the visibility on and off it doesn't matter as soon as i go back to record mode these glasses are not going to show up by default now they are only going to show up when i trigger them which is going to be with the g key here so yeah the glasses are gone and now if i press the g key on my keyboard they are showing up and as soon as i let go they go away i have some additional options down here if i had a midi hookup i could actually hook this up to a specific midi note to play and trigger i can also set it to latch and this is going to make it more like a light switch basically i don't have to hold down the g key if latch is checked it means i just have to press it once and let go and then it's going to stay in place until i click it again i use latch a lot in my puppets i personally find it a little bit easier to use and and not have to you know do these finger gymnastics to hold down multiple triggers at once but it's a personal preference there's no right or wrong way to do it you can play around with it and see what works best for you and then down here this is showing where the artwork is what is being triggered exactly so if i rename this to something else and i forget where it came from i can see the path down here and if i click on this it's going to highlight the correct artwork up here so even if i had something else selected if i click this it's going to add glasses now i can actually drag a lot of different things into here so let's say i also for some reason wanted the arms to be triggered by the exact same trigger so i could drag these in drag it over top of my trigger and now look the left arm and right arm are showing up as part of my layers and replays so if i went back to record mode now the glasses and the arms are all missing but if i press g they all come back and show up so a trigger can show and and trigger multiple things at once which is great for a character where you might want multiple things to change for their expression maybe their mouth and eyes and hand positions and other things all change at once to uh make a particular emotion come across but this is a completely useless trigger with the arms i don't know why i would use that so i'm just going to click the x down here to remove those two instances and now it's only going to be for the glasses so back in illustrator i'm just going to hide the glasses for now so i don't have to see them i usually like keeping my character in its default state um without triggers so i kind of have an idea of what it's going to look like at first but let's move on to a different situation where you may want to uh swap in different artwork at any given time not just have some disappear or reappear but to have you know one thing and then swap in something else to replace it a really common example of this is a hand position right so let's go ahead and i'm just going to select my right arm here and i'm going to click the new layer button like four times i'm gonna call one of these double click and call it hands and i'm gonna call one default one flip and one point and i'm gonna shift select these three and put them inside hands so now my hand group or you know container here has default flip and point i'm going to drag the hands into the right arm so now i've got inside my body i've got my plus right arm and inside that right arm i've got this artwork which is right now just called rectangle here and then i've got this blank container that's got default flip and point in it so let's start with default so to make the hand i'm going to use the pen tool again up here this is the easiest way for me to make a quick freeform shape so i'm going to make sure default is selected over here and i'm just going to click in this blank space and make something like this where i've got a thumb and then i click and drag like that and we'll come back down like that and there is a really basic hand now i can modify this however i want if i didn't like for example how much this is coming in like this i could do a window stroke and uh i'm gonna go to show options to see everything and then i have some different ideas of if i you know want rounded corners or how these things connect so you can play around with that with the pen tool i'll quite often uh play around with these and see what works best for the character but that's looking pretty good so i'm gonna have it i'm gonna rotate it down like this and try to connect it and have it line up as best i can i might have to resize it a little bit and it's not going to be perfect but i'm going to get it close enough that i feel it looks okay okay so there's this guy's basic default hand so let's really quickly make a variation of this where i'm just going to have the thumb flip to the other side basically so i'm just going to select this go to edit copy go on my flip layer right here and go to let's see select flip and go to edit paste and now this is going to show up in my flip layer but it's the exact same way i want it to actually go the other way so i'm just going to manually drag it like that and i'm just going to try to line it up as best i can now my defaults get in the way so i'm going to turn off the visibility of that for now and do something like that okay so now i've got my flipped variation i've got my default variation and now i want to also do a point so i'm just going to take this i'm going to take the pen tool i'm going to try to do it here but i also don't want to interfere with this artwork i've already have with the rectangle so i'm actually going to select this rectangle and lock it and that's going to not have me accidentally interfere with that and then i'll select my point and i'm just going to make a really basic you know point type thing so let's just make a thumb like this and then it comes out to a point like this and then we'll have it go in like that something like that to be my my point of view okay so now we've got these three different states default flip and point but i only am going to want one of these to show up at a time right i don't want them to always look like this so let's just keep default on by default i'm going to unlock rectangle now and i'm just going to save with this one hand with the arms like this and uh with the hands like this and let's see what happens in character animator all right so it looks like everything's synced up correctly and in my right arm group if i dig in here i should now see hands showing up as well and in here i've got default flip and point so what i'm going to do is actually grab the this grouping of these three different things hands i'm going to click and drag that group into this uh this triggers area but what i want to do is put it over create swap set swap set is a special type of trigger that says all right you've got a bunch of different things but i only want to show one at a time so i'm going to do that and that creates my swap set so what this swap set is saying is basically i've got a group called hands here and in these default is going to show up first whatever icon i have selected here is going to be the one that shows up by default so for some reason i want the point to show up first i could do that and select that but default is the one that i want so i'm going to set that you can also do it by checking down here instead the icon but i just use the icon okay so with default set i don't actually have to put a trigger for it because it's just automatically going to show up but let's move to flip this is something that i want to show up at times so i'm going to set this to 1 and then point i'm going to set to 2 and then i'm going to shift select both of these and latch them as well okay so what this is saying is default is going to show up but when i press 1 show the flip artwork and hide the default and when i show 2 show the point and hide anything else so let's go back to record mode and see what happens all right so i've got my character now with his hand and this looks good like this but when i start to wave it's facing the thumbs facing the other way but if i press the one key now it's looking correct and i've swapped in different artwork a lot of times in animation we will hide these things with our motions so if i do you know like this and then press one as i'm moving up it kind of hides that swap things are moving so fast that you don't see where that transition is happening so a lot of times you know when characters are doing quick arm movements they'll kind of hide the these uh these hand changes in there and then for the point uh that was the two key so i could press that and now he's got a point as well so this already adds a lot of additional emotion uh possibilities to my character um i can you know give him a lot more of you know a wave type animation or pointing at something or whatever and by the way when i already have like point triggered and then i press that trigger again when i press two it's just gonna go back to the default state um and so that's how i kind of set up you could add a trigger key for your default as well but for me that's just one more thing that i need to think about and so i just leave it as the default and let the other keys and triggers do the work now if you're adding a lot of triggers to your character it can be kind of difficult to remember what does what oh yeah i wanted to point was that one or two or did i do p for point and when you get to really complicated puppets where you're using every single value on the keyboard um you know how are you going to remember all this stuff well luckily there's a graphical way to do this in character animator over here by default we don't see the triggers panel by default although you can tab over to it if you want to i see controls instead and it see this button generate controls for blue guy sounds intriguing let's go ahead and click on it and see what happens so check that out it automatically made these buttons for me that i can trigger the different triggers with so if i do this and click on here instead of the g key it's going to trigger the glasses now i can still press g and it'll still light up and activate but this is just a more visual and i find fun way to do your different triggers so now i can see that this one doesn't have a key associated with it this is my default here and then i've got my flip and my point as well so this is great this is and this is really easy if i'm giving this puppet to someone else to record or sharing it with a friend or other people this lets them really easily see what all the triggers can do i even have the ability to add layout options as well so if i go into layout mode i can rearrange these however i want so maybe i actually don't want the default to show up at all i'll just select it and press delete and then i can rearrange these maybe i want my point to be more important they kind of snap into place into a grid as you move them around and that looks pretty good and then when i go back to perform mode now i've got my new setup now i can see this in rig mode too if i go to controls i've got the exact same thing i can't obviously activate them here because i don't have a active scene showing up but i can do all my layout stuff as well one cool little tip and trick that you can do is by default it's just going to take whatever artwork is visible and sometimes that works really well but sometimes you're going to want to make a custom icon maybe you want to add words in here or make something a really cool trick is you can drag anything from here like let's say i want the torso to show up instead of the point and i can drag this artwork into here in layout mode and now that's going to be the new thing that shows up instead of what's up by default and then i can undo that um and if there's multiple parts of uh of multiple artwork options available if i right click i can see those different artwork options show up here and i can also do a light or a dark background as well if i wanted to do that so you have a few little custom options here to make this controls panel as customized as you want and with that now you have the foundation of a basic character animator puppet we now know how to have a head and body how to have the head move around with our own head movements how to do eyebrows pupils blinking mouth movements adding cycle layers to certain mouse to make them a little more fluid as well as being able to drag the arms around and use triggers to get different things to appear so now that you have this basic foundation it's kind of up to you where to go from here you could just take the basics that we learned today and you can make some great character performances right and and if you use your own artwork for this instead this weird blue guy you can make some really great stuff and if you do this and then the intro to character animator video that kind of shows how the recording process you're pretty much set on making your own animated content out there but now that you've kind of scratched the surface you may be thinking well okay i want to do more like i want my character to walk and move around i want my character to be able to kick i want my character to be able to turn the head around and do head turns or parallax movements um i want to be able to trigger more complicated things like animated sequences called replays uh to make my character do like a flip or a kung fu kick or something like that well luckily we have a ton of tutorials about all of that stuff so if you want to dig in deeper to learning more about building on top of this foundation and adding new things to your character those videos are out there i've listed some of the most common ones in the video description below but feel free to search this channel this okay samurai channel for all sorts of different things and just keep adding and learning and building on your character and that's the great thing once you've got a rig for a puppet you can just keep editing it and building on it and making new things to it um and just evolving it over time and before you know it you're gonna have this really fully featured character with a great range of emotion and the ability to really you know make some really compelling animated stories and as an added bonus in the video description below i have a link to a free download of a intro to rigging project that's going to show you a bunch of different body types and common rig setups for characters it's going to be really simple so this character this is the first one this is front simple you'll see in the left-hand side here i've divided this into puppets and scenes so you can double click on any puppet to go into it in rig mode and see how you know everything was tagged by selecting it and then in the scene just double click on any one of these and it will show it to you in record mode so i'll quickly run through these as a preview of what you can expect if you want to dig into any of these and learn more about them so first we have just exactly what we just did making a very simple front-facing character and how i would you know do the arms and fixing the feet and basically everything we did for the past hour scene two is a quarter facing character so this is a three-quarter view character and this is gonna be a little more versatile because you can have it feel like it's talking to the audience in the screen or talking to other characters on the side and so rigging this is very simple it's very similar to the other one it's just a matter of where you put the arms and legs so this one shows up in front of the body and this one shows up behind or you could go all the way to the side like scene three and do a side character that's gonna be a complete profile view and the same thing where you've got an arm here but then i also have another arm hidden back here behind the character and so i can make gestures and motions like that scene four answers the common question what if i want my arms to go in front of my face because we normally say the head is in the front and the body is underneath it in the layers stack if you move your arms they're always going to look like they're going behind your head well in this case i've rigged the character so the arms can actually go in front of the face and it's really simple i just swapped the positions i put the body group first and the head group underneath and that's all you'd have to do scene 5 is a little weird but sometimes you want to make a character that the head and the body are actually one in the same so how would you go about doing that well you put all the facial features in the head group so the head group only is comprised of the eyes and the mouth and then the body group actually has the background of the head and the limbs attached to it and it's a pretty simple shadow scene six shows that we're not just limited to two-legged characters that i could do a four-legged character and fix all those different legs on the ground and still have some pretty good animation in motion seven starts to get into a walking character basically the way that we started to rig the arms for lim ik where we said where the shoulder and elbow and wrist were you just kind of extend that and you start to also show where the hips are where the ankles are where the knees are where the neck is and once you add all these different tags and sticks and move the origins around and all of that and add a walk behavior down here and have a bunch of variations uh for that uh your character is just going to automatically start walking if you are interested in having your character walk i highly suggest watching the dedicated walking tutorial which is going to go into detail about all the walking stuff i'm about to show so instead of having a character that only walks one way uh you could have a character like this this is a three view walk so this is scene eight in the project where i start in a stationary view but then when i press the left arrow keys my character starts to walk to the left if i let go stops and if i press right it looks like they're moving to the right and so this is a great way to create a really versatile character that can you know move around the scene quite a lot and finally even though the walk behavior is modeled for two legged characters and creatures you can actually kind of brute force your way into a four-legged character look this character has two walk behaviors so all i really did was have a walk behavior for these front legs and then a walk behavior for these back legs i tagged them all correctly and now i've got a four-legged character scene number 10 goes more in depth with the lim ik behavior so we only focused on the arms for our simple character but check it out you can also do the legs as well and have the knees bend in a correct position as well and what i love about this character is he also has a dragger right here in his neck so i can kind of drag and do some fun stuff like that i can even have him jump up in the air and land on the ground like that limit k is super awesome if you are interested in learning more about it check out the dedicated lim ik video again the link is in the video description below with scene 11 head turn your face does not always have to be in one position looking forward you can actually set it up where when you turn your head in the webcam your character's head is going to move around as well um so all i did was make multiple instances of my head and said this is my you know quarter view my profile view my front view and quarter and profile and if i tag all those and add the head and body turner behavior here it's going to do that and allow me to move my head around if you're interested in learning more about this check out the head turning and parallax tutorial video but scene 12 shows that you don't just have to limit it to the head it is called the head and body turner so as i turn my head i can actually turn my body as well and it's very similar to what i did with the head turner i'm just tagging my different views and putting different instances of them in there and then hooking them up to the head and body turner behavior scene 13 advanced head tilt is a technique that some of where advanced users are using to give a little bit more extra movement to the head so normally as i tilt my head left and right it's going to move my whole body with it but now i've got a little bit more independent control of my head and that allows me to look down look up get a little bit of additional rotation to my character it's a little bit tricky it involves tagging multiple things as head making things independent that are not usually independent um it's a little difficult but if you dig into the puppet you'll see how it's working and you can do a similar setup scene 14 is showing body tracking so yes i can hook up my character and say where the wrists are and elbows and all of that and then have my own webcam movements move the hands uh around so this is a very simple example of this character but i can also do full body tracking with the character as well if i wanted to so lots of possibilities here so if you're interested in learning about body tracking the links in the video description below so go have fun get started make your own characters make your own videos your own animations and uh just have a good time doing it now during the rigging process you might run into issues actually you will run into issues your puppet's head's going to fall off an eyeball is going to pop out of their head arms aren't going to be connected you're like what's going on and you're not going to remember oh yeah it was at you know minute 37 and 27 seconds when he was talking about this one specific detail that i need so if you do run into problems or forget some of these things it's okay the best place to get help is the official character animator forums you can post your puppets there people will take a look at them tell you what's wrong get you the help that you need or put you in the right direction for a particular video or resource or example that you're looking for and when you do make a character we'd love to see it so please use hashtag characteranimator on social media so we can check out your creations and see what you're up to but that is it for today thanks so much for watching this whole thing and sticking with it i'm really excited to see what everyone creates with it and uh until next time have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 141,559

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Id: hK-DjtiPzRs

Length: 98min 44sec (5924 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022