Making Your First Character - 2016 Version (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial)

hey my name is Dave and I'm a designer on the Adobe character animator team character animator lets you animate any photoshop or illustrator file by using your voice and a webcam today I'm going to walk through the process of making a puppet from scratch well split things up into three lessons first we'll focus on making an expressive face complete with head turns and a fire breathing animation second we'll learn about creating a body including swapping in different hand positions and creating poses finally we'll learn how to export this as a live cartoon or record edit and publish a great final piece this whole project is available as a free download so you can pick it apart and see exactly how everything was made and you're totally free to use this monster or any edited version of him for your own creations but ideally you'll use this as a guide to help create your own unique characters in your own unique style today I'm going to use Adobe Illustrator to build my character but you can just as easily use Photoshop and 90% of what we'll go through is the exact same for both programs you can also find and refer to a Photoshop version of this character in the example files okay let's make a new illustrator file usually I think about making the character in the highest resolution I'll need for a close-up shot I know that this guy is going to be in a YouTube video so I'm going to personally start with a 2000 by 2000 canvas just take a second to think about your final resolution and plan accordingly so when I'm making a new creation for character animator I always start with the head the face really is the most important and expressive part of a character but also one of the most complicated to put together so I always want to make sure that I get that part working before moving on to other stuff I'm going to start making my character using the pen tool just drawing simple shapes with a little bit of stroke to them and I'd say the only real guideline at this stage is to build your character as individual parts because you'll probably want to animate or manipulate each part later on so with this guy I've made an orange horn that has several pieces the main horn background a couple of strokes that I set at 25 percent opacity and a shadow layer that I'm saying that five percent opacity and I just made that shadow by duplicating my horn shape making it all black duplicating it again moving it over slightly and using Pathfinder tool to subtract them leaving me with a small portion of my horn that can now serve as my shadow so I'm not sure what I want to do with this horn yet maybe I wanted to have some slight gravity swayed to it or I wanted to move to sell a head-turning effect I'm not really thinking about that too much right now but I do know that this is an individual part that I may want to manipulate so I'm going to make it a group in Illustrator that's command + G on Mac or ctrl + G on Windows and I'm going to name it L horn for left horn and by left I mean the characters left side not the left side of the screen and I'll keep doing this making artwork grouping it and moving on until basically I have a bunch of parts so this is what a finished head might look like an illustrator just a bunch of groups and parts once I'm done with that I'm going to select everything and group it together and I'll rename this new parent group to head when I name something head that's just going to tell character animator that this is what I want to control with my own head then I'm going to rename my top level this is probably called layer 1 to a plus symbol and whatever your character's name is this guy is called Wilke so I'll type in plus Wilke all I'm doing here is creating a basic structure that will give me the most flexibility when controlling my character later I'll explain the plus symbol a little later on but just trust me for now so let's test it let's bring this into character animator and see if it's working character animator is part of Adobe After Effects CC 2015 or later so if you have After Effects you might not know it but you already have character animator just go to file open Adobe character animator to import our character go to file import find your saved AI or PSD file and bring it in this turns it into what we call a puppet and it gets a little puppet icon this panel on the left is your project panel where all your artwork and scenes and recordings will eventually show up let's double click on our puppet to open up the puppet panel now I can see all my groups and layers showing up on the left and my artwork on the right I want to point out a few things first I can select the head group and look in the tag section in the properties panel on the right notice how the head graphic is illuminated that means character animator sees that I have named a layer or group as head and has automatically tagged it for me if I switch on the text view I can see all the canonical name's the character animator is looking for in this case it found head so that's lit up we're gonna be tagging a lot more part soon but for now the tag area is a handy cheat sheet for all the potential parts you can control here's another thing see that yellow dotted circle in the middle of the head that's at origin point handle that's the spot where the head will pivot and move from I want my head to pivot from the neck so I'm going to drag that point to the bottom of the head alright everything's looking pretty good so with our puppet selected in the project panel let's click Add to new scene at the bottom think of it this way puppets are your actors and actresses and scenes are their stage and that's where you get to perform and see things come alive if you click on your scene in the project panel you'll get the scene properties on the right here I'm set at 24 frames per second at 1280 by 720 and that's fine for me but your puppet may be too big or small for your scene so you have a few options number one you can change the width and height here to adjust the scene size and to select your puppet in the timeline twirl down the transform properties on the right and drag over the values for position X Y or scale to move the puppet to a better location so hopefully things just start working automatically and you can start controlling this head with your own head if not make sure your camera is showing up in the upper right corner and that both these little webcam and microphone icons are blue meaning they're on if you're not seeing your camera click the little menu icon up here and select switch to next camera until it finds yours once your cameras working you should see these little tracking dots appear on your face if they're not you can double click your face to try to force it to find you for the best results you want your face to be well lit so the tracker can pick out all your features personally I usually shine my desk lamp towards my face anytime I'm recording and if you click set rest pose you'll reset the default starting position of the head which you should always do when getting started so if I move in and then click set rest pose it's going to think that that closer up view is my starting position and react accordingly overall things are looking good we're off to a solid start I can move left and right in and out and so on the puppets head should be tracking your own head so let's go back to illustrator and see if we can build on top of this the first thing I want to do is think about identifying which parts I want to be able to move independently from the face so an example of that is an eyebrow right in general you want it to follow your head but you also want it to be able to move up and down on its own so if each eyebrow isn't in its own standalone group already you should do that now and then we want to add a plus symbol to the front of each name that's the information that character animator needs to know to let these have the freedom to move on their own which we call warp independent moving back to character animator first notice how our changes are being synced when you make a change in photoshop or illustrator character animator recognizes that change and updates accordingly in the puppet panel now notice instead of the plus in the display name we have these filled in puppet icons signaling that they are warp independent also notice that a two has been added to one of my brow groups because every puppet component needs a unique identifying name and if you check out the layer properties on the right you'll see the warp independently box is checked now we have to tag the eyebrows correctly so let's select the left eyebrow go to the tag section and tag the left eyebrow and then we'll do the same for the right eyebrow if I go back to my scene now the eyebrow should move along with my own eyebrows I can adjust how much they move by twirling down the face properties on the right and playing around with the eyebrow strength parameter for this guy I'm liking around 50% while I'm here I'm also going to adjust the head scale strength to 0% because I don't really want my head to shrink or grow I'll generally fine-tune each of these parameters for every puppet I make to get the exact level of expressiveness that I want next let's tackle the eyes so I had previously grouped each eye together a left eye and a right eye in Illustrator if I wanted to manipulate these objects more I just have to double click on them until I enter isolation mode so let's do that and make our three groups inside each eye eyeball pupil and blink if you haven't made a blink layer yet now is a good time to I'm just going to duplicate my eyeball layer change it to the skin color draw a line through the middle of it and group that together I'll toggle the visibility off for now and do it for each eye and just like the eyebrows we want the P people's to move independently as you look around so for each eye we should add a plus in front of the pupil group name I'd also recommend adding a plus to each parent eye group because characters can have parallax effects and other things where you might want the eye group to move on its own you probably noticed I also have extra eyelid layers inside my eyes too don't worry about that now as long as I have those other groups I should be okay quick aside for those of you who are used in Photoshop the same grouping structure applies it just looks a little different over here you can see the full group structure instead of going into isolation mode just put those eye groups inside your head group and you'll be fine time to head back to character animator and now I need to tag each of the eye groups the parent group should be tagged left eye and right eye so just click on the big eyeball circles for each group then tag left pupil left blink which is the thin line that goes behind the pupil and right pupil and right blink now by default character animator is going to use the perimeter of your eye group as the bounding box for your pupils you probably don't want your pupils flying out of your eyeballs right but we do have an extra option and those are these little dotted lines on the side down there that set to more specific pupil range so if you ever have a character where the pupils are moving too wide or too narrow within the default eye range you can tag any layer with pupil range and that will take over let's head over to the scene and if I did everything correctly my character's pupils should now be following my pupils and staying within the confines of the eyeball and when I blink my character should blink as well you may want to make some more adjustments in the face properties like I gaze strength I sent mine to 75% so the pupils don't dart around as much and if I don't like the blinking I can always turn it off by setting eyelid strength to zero notice I also have the blink eyes together checkbox which is on by default but unchecking that will allow me to wink if I want to okay now let's talk about the mouth check out the mouths in the tags area down here your mouth is a group that includes up to 14 different shapes three of these are controlled by your webcam when no one is talking when no voice is being picked up and those are neutral smile and surprised the other 11 come from analyzing audio either in real time as you talk or from an imported audio track you bring in so character animator automatically recognizes over sixty different sounds and will automatically serve up the mouth that it thinks is the best fit for what it's hearing but the little images in these tags are a pretty good guide for what a potential shape might look like now depending on your character an art style your mouths may look really different but generally speaking and on mouth is going to be pretty wide open mmm is going to be closed and so on we have a few choices here we can start from scratch or we can steal from another character and modify it so I'm gonna steal I'm going to click on the welcome tab which should be up here if it's not you can go to window welcome and I'm going to click on new puppet in illustrator and that's going to open up the default blue puppet guide that character animator comes with names Stanny both as a puppet and a scene in character animator and the illustrator source file this guy is a good example of how to structure things so if you're ever stuck or something isn't working right refer back to Stanny and see how he was put together and organized and it might help but for today I just need his mouth which just happens to be the exact same shapes as the tag and icons I'm going to double click the mouth to isolated selected copy it and then return to my monster and paste it as part of the head I'll delete my existing mouth and move this one over if I twirl the mouth group out I can see it already has every shape name correctly and those will be Auto tagged the next time I go into character animator also notice that the mouth group has a plus in front of it again we may want to move this on its own later so it's good practice to keep it independent I'm going to do a few small modifications I'll flip the mouse around and my character has more of a black stroke around everything so I think these would look better if I added strokes around the teeth and tongues to make them feel more in the same style and maybe your character has fangs or a more hand sketch look or it's a robot with a waveform display so you can edit these or replace them with your own mouths just use this as a starting point and guide back to character animator make sure your puppet is selected in the timeline and your microphone icon is on you should be seeing a green bar moving around as you talk if you don't try checking your system preferences or character animator preferences to see what's showing up there you could just use your webcam audio I'm using a USB condenser mic but that's up to you anything should work now when I talk my monster is talking as well and should be doing a pretty good job of keeping up and if I'm quiet I can also try to trigger smile and surprised I found that once you make one mouth in a style that works for you you can keep using it for multiple puppets so it's worth tweaking to get it feeling just right and try to talk loud and clear close to your microphone without a lot of background noise because that helps too if you're talking quietly or far away and see this audio level too low warning get closer or check your system preferences to raise your input volume in general a clear loud signal is going to give you the most accurate lip-sync results a little detail that adds some life to puppets is the ability to make certain parts of them sway and flop around as you move you just focus on performing and the secondary animations follow your lead so you don't have to worry about them so maybe your character has hair fur a necklace a tail or something that might benefit from adding some physics to it for this guy I'm thinking I want to do something with his three strands of spiky hair up top the only thing I have to worry about an illustrator is that each of these is their own group so each hair strand is separate and each has a plus in front of their name because just like most of the parts we've tagged so far we want them to be able to move on their own let's go to the puppet panel in each hair group I'm going to do two things first remember what we did with the head when we dragged the origin handle to where the neck would be because that's where we wanted it to pivot from same thing here we probably want these hair strands to bend from their roots and said the default middle of the layer so I'll drag the origin handle towards the bottom second I'll select the dangle tool down here the little pendulum icon and you can think of it as a little metal ball or weight that's going to determine where gravity is pulling down for the hair I want that to be at the top of the strand so I'll place it up there I'll repeat this for every hair group moving the origin down and placing a dangle point where the origin and dingle point reside can lead to different effects so feel free to play around with these and see what looks best to you by default if I move around you can see a little sway but it's barely there so let's twirl down the properties and change the spring stiffness to 65 now it's a little more visible I can play around with a lot of options here gravity strength and direction wind effects and more just like the face parameters we tweaked every character is going to feel different so play around with these and see what looks best to you and if your hair ever looks lopsided or weird like this you can reset the scene by clicking this little refresh button the eyes are one of the most expressive parts of a character and if we just have them looking around and blinking with the occasional raised eyebrow it works all right but that can finds us to a very limited range of emotions I can't really show my character getting angry or worried or other common feelings what we're going to do is give this guy a few different I related animations that I can trigger by tapping letters and numbers on my keyboard let's start with the eyebrows I want to be able to control these to slant downwards when I want to convey anger so let's double click on the right eyebrow until I've isolated it and renamed the single shape to normal this is going to be my default eyebrow position then let's select the eyebrow copy it paste in front that's command F on Mac or ctrl F on Windows and rotate it slightly downwards and I'll rename this layer to angry then I'll go back and do the exact same thing for the left eyebrow if I go to character animator now both eyebrows are showing up at the same time so I need to set a key trigger on my angry eyebrow to only show up when I press the a key I'll do that by finding and selecting my angry layers I can select both the same time by pressing command click on Mac or ctrl click on Windows then go into the trigger section the properties panel type in a for the key and check the hide siblings box what that means is that when I press a I want character animator to only show these layers and hide everything else that's on the same level inside the group in this case just the normal eyebrows that's the only other thing in the group at this time notice in the keyboard trigger column I now also have an a listed when I tried in my scene it works when I hold down a my eyebrows get angry when I let go they return back to normal this is the foundation of a very basic but powerful concept keys can trigger all sorts of different variations for your puppet I'm going to go back to illustrator and add some worried eyebrows at the same level as normal and angry again I'll just copy and paste the normal eyebrow and slanted slightly upwards to look worried I want to rig this to W and here's a new trick in preview 4 I can actually click in the keyboard trigger column to quickly type in my keyboard shortcuts there I'll want to still make sure to click hide siblings in the trigger area for each one though and checking out my scene now I can easily switch between normal angry and worried eyebrows so this is a great start but the transition between eyebrows is a little clunky they immediately kind of teleport to the new position and that can be a little distracting to the viewer I'm going to make the smoother so I'm going to create an in-between state for each of these let's go over the angry eyebrows I'm going to duplicate one and make it rotate slightly then duplicate that one again and rotate it more fill it in the space between I'm going to call these angry one angry two and angry three then I'm going to group them all together and rename this group to angry and I'm going to do the exact same thing for the other angry eyebrow and the two worried eyebrows making a group with three gradually rotating eyebrow states going back to character animator this brings up an important point about artworks inking in general character animator will try to do everything it can to keep everything in sync your Photoshop Illustrator file and the character animator specific edits you've made on top of it however in this case I change the grouping structure the hierarchy within the eyebrows so character animator doesn't see the old single layer worried and angry eyebrows I used to have so those key triggers I added before are lost I can easily fix that now but just a warning this can cause really big problems if you rename or move folders around making structural changes in your master artwork you can lose your tags triggers those dangle handles all your rigging and character animator so just be mindful of that first things first I'm going to add those keyboard triggers back in so select the angry parent groups and trigger that with a and hide siblings and do the same for worried W and hide siblings now I'm going to select all of these triggered groups find the behaviors area of the properties panel and click plus and I'll see this list of a bunch of special stuff I could add to my character behaviors are unique scripts that tell our puppet to do something new and extend their functionality and we're going to touch on several of these throughout the course of this tutorial for now let's focus on cycle layers which believe it or not cycles through several layers in a group and these parameters let me determine how exactly that cycle works so really this is a way to do frame by frame animation within character animator I can take any multi frame sequence put it in order in a group so layer one layer two layer three and play it back for the eyebrows I want them to start when triggered move from top to bottom advance everyone frame I want things to move fast only cycle once and I want to check both of these boxes forward and reverse and hold on last layer let's return to the scene and see what this does so now when I press a I'm triggering a three frame animation I'm moving from the normal eyebrow to an angry eyebrow with the layers I added in between and even with just those three frames it feels a lot smoother not as jumpy as before and because I checked those last two boxes it's holding on the last frame and then reversing back to its default position when I let go of the a key keyboard triggers and cycle layers are a very powerful combination ended up doing the same thing for my eyelids I'm not going to bore everyone and walk through every step of this you can dig into the file and take a closer look if you want to but I mean a new group called lids and I wanted this characters default lid position to be about a third of the way down so I called that normal and then I made a few other groups inside with keyboard triggers and cycle layers that let my character widen his eyes and then return to normal and then close them all the way and also return to normal again all of these are just groups with sequences of layers just to add some additional subtle range I also made some slightly raised and slightly lowered single frame lids now I've got a much more varied repertoire of emotions particularly when I combine the eyebrows and eyes together and anything is fair game if you want to trigger a special big mouth when your character yells or bulging eyeballs when they're scared or red pupils when they're angry or whatever you can do it in fact you can swap out a whole different head so my head group could have two groups inside of it normal and red and inside red I have a sequence of three head States where my character is gradually getting slightly redder closing his eyes slanting his eyebrows having his hair blown back and a few other things I just added cycle layers to the parent red group and triggered it with the R key for the actual fire I found these awesome free sprite animations online from a game developer called PAL studios I really like this flamethrower one in particular so I'm in a new group inside the final red head group called fire and placed the sequence inside then I added a keyboard trigger in cycle layers at the top level so now I can combine these by pressing R for the red face animation and f-for the fire animation one other new preview for trick if i press command + /on mac or ctrl + /on windows I'll get a handy cheat sheet of all my active keyboard triggers with an option to copy to the clipboard so I could have a master list of all my commands very handy the last thing we're going to cover with the head is one more optional element that can help add some dimension to your puppets you may want your character to turn their head in different directions to look at other characters and props look at the camera or anywhere else to add some visual diversity if this is the first character you're making I'm going to advise you to skip this step and come back here when you're on your second or third puppet and I say that because head turning is going to require some group restructuring and illustrator and unfortunately that means we'll lose most of our tags behaviors and rigging within character animator it's not the end of the world it'll take a few minutes of work to get back up and running but ideally this is something to think about when you're first making your character and plan accordingly starting in Illustrator I'll select my head and group it again and call this new group + frontal because this is the front view before I copy this head several times to create some different views to make my life a little easier I'm going to rename the key parts to their canonical names that way things will be Auto tagged in each view and won't require me digging in and tagging 14 different eyebrows so I'm mainly looking at left and right eyebrow I pupil blink and eyeball if you're not sure what these are you can always refer back to the text tag section and character animator then I'll select my frontal group and using option click on Mac or alt click on Windows I'll drag and make a copy of my group and call it plus left quarter then I'll double-click the head again to isolate just my new left quarter view and I'm going to select elements and using shift + the left arrow move them all slightly left a little so I'll do this to the eyes eyebrows nose mouth hair and horns the one thing that I'll move right instead is this corner on the left it's kind of behind the head so I wanted to actually move the other way to feel like it's continuing to rotate behind everything if I toggle the visibility I can get a quick feel of how this turn will look I'll continue this pattern several more times eventually building all seven possible different head positions left profile left frontal right quarter right profile upward and downward you definitely don't have to use them all but I did for the sake of example now I should note that my jumps between views are pretty small and subtle like the left profile is not a true side view but that's a matter of personal preference and it's really up to you how much you want these views to vary just remember that if things feel too clunky or slow as you transition it can feel pretty amateurish now we're ready to return to character animator and luckily setting up head-turning is simple I just select the parrot and head group inside the puppet panel go to my behaviors and add head turner if I named everything inside that group correctly then I should see a bunch of names with once next to them if not that's okay I can select any wrongly titled layers twirl open the tag section and easily tag them using the little heads down here if I go to my scene now my puppet is automatically turning his head to match my own I can adjust the sensitivity down here to determine when the switches are taking place I could also key trigger each of these views along with hide siblings checked if I wanted more manual control personally if I'm doing a live stream or a demo I use the automatic webcam controlled head turning because it's one less thing I have to worry about triggering but I've been doing a recorded performance I'm trying to finesse and get perfect I tend to stick to keyboard triggers so see what feels best for whatever your end goal is now if I wanted those extra keyboard triggers or behavior driven effects to carry over in each view so the moving eyebrows eyelids the dangling hair the red face fire breathing I need to manually riad those to each group so yeah that's a decent amount of upfront rigging work but it'll help the end result feel a little more smooth or you can pick a choose like the red face fire breathing feels too complicated to carry over into every view so I skip that but I did carry over the eyelid eyebrow and dangling hair strands and that's it congratulations now you hopefully know the basics of making a head and character animator and can start applying these steps to help bring your own creations to life and that's really the best thing to do just have fun and experiment so by now you should have a structure that looks something like this a main character group with a head group inside of it now you just have to make another group inside your character and below your head called body is where we'll put everything else to support the head similar to the head I'm going to start drawing the body using shapes and the pin tool in Illustrator and thinking with a similar setup where I'll group a name all my distinct parts so I can easily manipulate them later the torso can be its own big group it's just going to get pulled in different directions by the head or various limbs I'll build my limbs on top of that note that layer order is very important here I know that I want my left arm to go in front of my character not behind so I'll make sure to put that towards the top same with feet if I wanted to do a walking animation with this character I'd want the left leg to walk in front of the right if everything wasn't grouped together and all in the same layer character animator wouldn't know what was in front or behind and you'd end up getting these meshes fighting for the same position when you move them around later which never looks good so think about that layer order now if I go to character animator now I'll see the body flopping around following the lead of the head for my character I'm noticing he seems to be pivoting from a point somewhere outside of the torso so I can go into the puppet panel and when I select my top layer I noticed that my character is in a big rectangle bounding box and the origin handle is in the middle of it the reason for this is my head had that fire breathing animation and although I may have hidden it by default it's still being calculated as part of the whole puppet but I can remedy this by selecting and dragging the origin to a better center of gravity like around where a belly button would be now my character seems to pivot from the waist as I might expect even subtle changes to origin locations can have dramatic impact on how your character moves and pivots finally for the time being I want my character's feet to stay planted in the ground so I'll highlight my body group select the little thumbtack tool down here and click on each of the feet this creates fixed handles which will nail these parts of the puppet down and prevent them from moving now in my scene my character's feet stay still while the rest of the body is free to move around the arms and hands are another huge potential source of expressiveness a character who can flail their arms point things give a thumbs up and more can add to the emotions the facial features and voice are trying to convey I found that having the arms in an a position so outstretched and slanted downwards is a great default state I'll also want to make sure my left and right arms are warp independent by adding a plus symbol in front of their layer names inside each arm I'll create a hand group just like I did before with the eyebrows and eyelids I want to be able to switch between several different hand positions and the best way to do that is to put everything inside a group which will add key triggers to you later you can make up as many hands as you want for me I did some variations on default pointing and thumbs up hands I included some flipped versions because certain orientations will look better or worse depending on where the arm position is let's get things ready in the puppet panel and character animator first I'll twirl down my hands folders and for every variation except whichever one I want is my default I'll assign a unique key trigger with hide siblings checked now in my scene when I press those keys the hands will switch States but if I move my head around look what's happening my warp independent arms are becoming detached from the body I need to be more specific in how my limbs get attached I'll select my left arm group find the staple tool and staple at the part where I want the arm to connect in this case around the shoulders stapling is a quick way to attach an independent part to its parent my body now gives a new handle which is essentially the socket that my arm is connected to I'll do the same thing for the right arm and now the arm should follow the body as expected to move limbs and character animator we drag them with a mouse or fingers on a touch enabled device like a surface pro in the puppet panel I'll select the left arm find the dragger tool and add a draggable handle to the middle of the hand if I return to my scene now I can bend the arm by dragging around the left hand if I do the same to the right arm then I have two draggable areas and whichever one is closest to where I start my drag will be the one I control by default once I release my drag the hand will immediately return to its default position but I have some control over this if a twirl down dragger in the properties panel on the right the return duration determines how long it takes for the arm to travel back to its default position after release so if I set this to 2 the arm would try to smoothly go back to the original position over the course of two seconds the option I use the most though is changing after move to hold in place this turns your character into an action figure allowing you to create poses that stick until you move them again if I didn't like the spaghetti noodle look of the arms and wanted to add more structure into them I could select an arm find the stick tool and drag where I'd expect this character's bones to be like the forearm and bicep leaving some space in between for the elbow sticks let you have more control over which parts of a character you don't want to bend so now that noodle has some scaffolding behind it staying firm in the stick areas but bending elsewhere one other area of control I have is attach style by default a stapled limb is going to be welded to its parent as if you took a blowtorch to where they connected and merge them together but you do have some other options especially hinge which will instead make the attach style like a helicopter blade rotating around instead of being stuck in one place play around with it and see what works best for your character this guy is a tail which I want to bounce and sway a little as I move so I'll make it a warp independent group move the origin to where it connects to the body and add a dangle handle to the end maybe your character has a tie or dress or necklace or some other accessory that you might want to have a secondary animation so take a look and think if there are any parts that might benefit from having some physics added to them earlier I added two fixed handles to the feet to plant them to the ground but depending on your final output maybe you want your character to be a little less stationary so I could delete those fixed points off the body group and do the same thing that I did to the arms to the legs that's making them warp independent stapling them and adding sticks and draggable handles now I can drag the legs just like the hands in a later lesson we'll talk about how we could use this to record a walk cycle animation but for now you can just make some fun poses for even more control I can add additional draggable handles at places like the heel knee and elbow to give more precise movement for each part I often play around with sticks draggable handles and fixed handles to get different results for how my character moves with that now we have a pretty good looking character who's our and ready for the spotlight live animation is one of the more exciting ways to share your character think of it as being able to take your scene and broadcast that anywhere whether it's projected on a big screen at a live event or over a live online video stream this leads to a number of exciting new creative possibilities that haven't been possible before with traditional animation first let's add an environment so our character has a world to live in to add a background to my character animator scene I can just import a background PSD or AI file and drag it into my existing scene I can change the order of my scene components by selecting the track and going to timeline arrange move up or move down and again characters and backgrounds can be repositioned or resized by using the transform parameters on the right preview for of character animator has added siphons support from Mac os10 syphon is an open source technology that allows applications to share video frames with one another in real time there are many programs that utilize syphon for example a popular live video streaming tool for sites like twitch and YouTube is OBS studio in OBS syphon is listed as one of the available sources if I enter the source settings and have character animator running the character animator scene automatically shows up as an option if I select this I get my scene as a clean output without the mouse cursor or any additional UI and can now broadcast that to whatever destination I want note that syphon is a video only protocol so you'll have to find and enable your audio source separately one especially intriguing option is to turn off your background layer and character animator by clicking the eyeball toggle in the timeline then check allow transparency in OBS source properties now you have a video layer of just your isolated puppet that you can put on top of whatever other source you want a live camera feed video game screen capture or any other supported media type that you can think of character animator can also record your performances and allow you to edit multiple takes to create a final piece that could be exported as a standalone ready to share video through Adobe Media encoder or a character that you can composite into another scene within popular video programs like After Effects and Premiere Pro when you're in a scene take a closer look at the behaviors on the right these represent the things that you can record and anything with a red dot next to it means it's armed for recording so if I turn everything off except for lip sync then character animator is only looking for my lip sync not my face movements arms dragging keyboard triggers or anything else so while you could arm everything and record it all at once you also have the flexibility of recording each part separately so you can focus on perfecting one element at a time note that dangle and transform don't have a red dot next to them and that's because they're passive if you twirl them down you'll see that none of the parameters are armed they're just working in the background and 99% the time that's probably what you want but if you needed any of these elements to change in your animation like your character scaling up or down you would just armed that parameter which also turns on the parent behavior and drag the value during recording character animator is a performance based tool not a traditional keyframe tool so to animate you're not moving keyframes around your acting I usually start with the lip sync that gives me a vocal track as a foundation to react to for the rest of my performance so I'll disarm everything except for lip sync if I select my puppet in the timeline and press record I'll record my voice when I press record again to stop my puppet gets to tracks the actual audio track and all the changing mouth shapes as a lip sync track ideally the lip-sync is perfect and you don't need to do anything more to it but if you see a wrong mouth pop up somewhere or some other imperfection you can isolate this section by splitting it out that's edit split and then timeline split lip sync into visitings this will show you a track for every mouth shape which you can move extend trim or delete but most of my voices come from pre-recorded audio so usually I record and edit the track in Adobe Audition first then I import it into character animator drag it into my scene and as long as my character is selected and lip-sync armed I can go to timeline compute lip sync from scene audio which will analyze the audio track and render out the appropriate mouth shapes once I'm done with audio I'll disarm lip-sync and turn my microphone off so as not to accidentally create more voice recordings next I'll usually arm the face before I record I want to make sure my character is calibrated correctly so I'll make sure I'm close to the camera when a well-lit environment look at my character's eyes and click set rest pose one option I like to use a lot is slow-motion recording which is this number next to the record button if I select three-quarter speed then when I press record I'll hear the voice playback slower and have a little more time to react to things when I finish this performance I'll get a face track in the timeline using the scene controls I can return to the start and play my combined lip-sync and face performance back and I can drag this track to move it or drag the edges to trim or extend it but there's a section here where I wish the head was in a different position luckily I don't have to re-record the whole thing I just need a small fix so I'll drag the current time indicator handle to a little before the problem area position my head like I wanted record for a few seconds and stop now I have a new take that shows up above the old take and overshadows it in character animator whatever take is on top is the winner so here I start with my original take jump to the new one and then return to the old one to make the transition smoother I've blend handles on the edges if I drag these just a little towards the middle I'm creating a gradual ramp up and down for the new take in doing this the takes will gracefully blend and ease into each other looking like one seamless performance it's very common for me to record one long take and then do several blended fixes like this throughout fixing mistakes or accentuating certain parts another very common edit I'll make is modify an eye movement and the most precise way to do this is by disarming camera input and arming I gaze via mouse input now I can drag the pupils around with the mouse giving me much more precision I find that this can be a lot easier if you temporarily decrease the head position scale and tilt to 0% which keeps the head stationary and lets you focus solely on recording the eyes controlled by mouse movement after recording I can set these back to their previous values currently I gaze doesn't have a blend so I tend to hide and where the mouse input takes over behind blinks just drag the edges to trim the eye gaze so it starts and ends when the eyelids are closed so far so good so let's disarm face and move on to the dragger in most cases I'll want to focus on controlling one limb at a time so let's focus on the left arm first with the arms I'm usually trying to get pretty quick movement so I'll often turn down the slow motion recording to 50% most of the time I'll have my arms in a default rest state like on the hips but then I'll throw in gestures and movements when it feels appropriate once I'm done with the left arm I'll move on to the right one thing to note because dragger is universally armed character animator is ready for any limb to be dragged so by default if I start recording the right arm I won't see the left performance I just did because it's armed to record again instead showing me the default starting position but rest assured that data is still there and when I finished recording my right arm take I'll get a separate track for it and completely the whole thing back combined so one way to make a character walk would be dragging the arms and legs to one extreme end pose and record a take then pose them with their arms and legs going the opposite way and record that you could then extend the bottom take and then blend and duplicate the top take over and over again to keep switching between poses then you could arm position X in the transform tool and record your character moving you could even record two takes of the character being in two different positions and blend those so we walk smoothly from point to point the last thing we'll focus on recording our keyboard triggers the best way to set up keyboard triggers is by adding multiple behaviors for every triggered group your character has you can do this in the puppet panel by selecting your top level master puppet and adding a new keyboard trigger behavior this renamed for every element you may want to trigger so for this guy that's the eye brows eyelids his fire-breathing face and his hand positions if I return to my scene I'll see my new behaviors showing up in the list and now I can arm and focus on one part at a time this keeps them separate otherwise you run the risk of triggers overriding one another and it's more difficult trying to tackle all the triggers at once just focusing on the eyebrow or just focusing on the hands is a lot easier so that's what I'll do arm one keyboard trigger record a performance and repeat the process with the next one once I'm happy with my performance I have several options if I wanted to save this as a video I can go to file export ad to Adobe Media encoder queue this opens up Adobe Media encoder which by default will make an mp4 of your scenes dimensions duration and frame rate just press return or the green play button to start things off and render your file you also have a ton of system presets so if you wanted a video optimized for YouTube or Facebook you can just drag that into your queue and render that version as well but I can also export this character as a sequence to bring it to After Effects or premiere pro to do more with if you're going this route you might want to turn off any background and make sure your scene is wide enough so the character isn't getting cut off then go to file export pink sequence and wave this will render out your performance as a sequential group of pink files one file for each frame of your sequence to bring your performance into Premiere Pro go to file import and select the XML file that gets created as part of the render this will bring in your character as a new sequence which you can then manipulate however you want like layering a narrator character overtop of an underlying video track to bring your performance into After Effects go to file scripts new comp from character animator recording select any ping from your sequence and you'll import everything as a new composition you can then layer and manipulate this over top of other media allowing you to compose more elaborate multi-layered scenes and that's it now you know the basics of creating and animating a puppet within character animator hopefully now you know enough to start making your own unique animated creations in the video description below you can download this example character or check out a larger example project filled with dozens of different characters to play around with if you run into any questions feature requests or bug reports along the way check out the forums link at the bottom of the Welcome panel which will take you to the official Adobe comm forums good luck and thanks for watching

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 970,073

Keywords: adobe character animator, cartoon, animate, animation, after effects, adobe, character, puppet, 101, tutorial, example, files

Id: _smLXODTd6U

Length: 45min 12sec (2712 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2016