This is so helpful!! I love the idea of doing just a few key frames. One trick for the left/right versus up/down motion. You can right click on the position and split x from y. So they get their own kehframes I also am going to have to try the nonpuppet puppets!
TBH, CH isn't that great currently with morphing shapes outside of faking it with cycle layer - I would probably go for Animate or After Effects for that.
Hello, Dave, I am a fan from China. I have been using AE to make MG animations until one day I saw the animation you made using Ch on RU-vid. I really like it and have been studying your tutorials. I hope to watch it. I will go to the specific CH engineering details of how you made the "console", copy them and learn from them. Thank you very much.
Dave, I love your content, tutorials, and especially all of the characters you create. I use them daily to practice how characters emote in gestures and move in space. Well done.
Wanted to thank you for your videos. I was struggling to find a way to make some graphs interesting in a video I recently made. I knew nothing about Character animate, but a few of your videos later I was able to make a character to give the video what it seemed to need. Thanks heaps!
hello david Clicking on Edit Original should open the original source in Photoshop. It is no longer visible. doesn't appear. The Photoshop program itself runs. In this case, please tell me how to solve it. The Photoshop source (original) of the puppet is in the existing folder. well stored
Great video as always! I'm curious about your reasons behind creating different scenes/comps out of your mega scene? There's always 1 million ways to do something in AE, I'm curious why you don't just make one new 1080p comp and keyframe the position/scale of the mega scene inside that?
Totally a valid way to do it as well! For me, I like the editing experience of having all these named shots and trimming them more like an NLE. But I have totally done it the hold keyframe / reposition comp way too! Whatever workflow works best for you!
Excellent video. Will we see character animator support live vector puppets, without rasterizing, and perhaps implement deformers in the future? Thanks for your never ending hard work.
The 2019 version is pretty old, there have been lots of bug fixes and improvements since then...I recommend upgrading to the latest (2023) version. But even in 2019, if rigged correctly the body should follow the head movements.
hello dave when you have two faces After assigning a face to the parent folder When specifying the jaw joint among the faces of each subfolder When changing the type of face using the swap trigger I can't use it because the jaw behavior is mixed. So, unassign the face to the parent folder After assigning a face to the heads of subfolders, set the face behavior to each Applying it creates a very strange state. What should I do to solve this?
Yes, in general behaviors will only work for the first tags they find and ignore others. If you set up each face view with a view tag (like frontal or left profile) then behaviors should carry through - see any character with head turning for an example of this in action. That way you would only need to set up Nutcracker Jaw at the top level and it should work for all tagged view instances. If the problem persists, please upload a screenshot, video, or your File > Export > Puppet file to the official forums at adobe.com/go/chfeedback so we can take a closer look.
@@okaysamurai Thanks for the reply. In the heads of sub-head folders under the parent head folder Substituting the jaw (walnut chipper) will make a mess. Other settings (eyebrows, mouse settings) operate normally. If you don't understand, I will send you the video via email.
Hi,Dave. And what if you wanted to do another episode of the series? Should you adjust the sizes of all the elements and puppets used in the mega scene again to animate another script? or how are the setups reused?
Since I'm most likely making a new scene for each puppet, I would probably make those new scenes in CH and then re-import them into a new megascene comp in AE. But keeping the same puppets and scenery artwork helps save a ton of time!
Just a thought! You guys should make purchasing character animator as a single app. instead of having to get the complete subscription to get the pro version!
Hello Dave, thank you for your tutorials, they're truly a lifesaver. I was wondering if you could share your PC specs, because even though I have a quite powerful Macbook Pro, I really do struggle with AE performances, especially using several characters in a Megascene like you do. (characters are also pretty advanced and high resolution). Thanks a lot!
Hey Dave, loving your work its actually encouraged me to start practicing on my own. I was wondering if you could direct me to a tutorial where you can make a puppet file from scratch? I am in the works of drawing a new character in photoshop but I can't seem to find how to make it into a puppet file. Thanks a lot!
This is the best one: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hK-DjtiPzRs.html. It's in Illustrator but 99% of the same stuff applies in PS and I try to call out when there's a difference.
Would be cool if you guys had a puppet market to buy from where puppet creators can sell & adobe makes a cut. I say this because from a content creator who just wants to use puppets & not create them, it leaves me with just head moment. I don't need the whole puppet making editor but I would like hands control without a subscription just for this
Question: can you animate a mouth so the different mouth states morph/shape-tween into each other instead of cutting to each other, like a rigged mouth muscle?
Sadly no, there are no current morphing options, although the Digital Puppets UK guys do a lot with cycle layers that make mouths seem more fluid if you want to look up their work (they also did the Unicorn character on the homepage).
Amazing tips, thanks for sharing :) I just have a question regarding the last tip, what would you do if you want a wide shot showing the whole scene? Would you just scale the mega scene down to fit the standard HD dimensions?
Yep! Scaling down is totally fine; the problems basically only show up when anything goes over 100%. Although in my case, the apartment image is too long to fit into a complete wide shot, so I can only show one section with the ceiling to the floor.
Hi Dave, I didn't know this program exists and I'm thinking of getting this. Is it possible aside from saving the work as a video, to save a particular pose of a character as an image that can be used for a children's magazine? I hope so, it really looks great! Keep up the good work cheers
Hi Dave, I was wondering if it was possible to buy the Adobe Creative Cloud package with a one time purchase? I really like Character Animator but I don't know if I will be able to keep using it in the near future. Annual subscription looks a bit too pricey for me it seems.
Unfortunately not currently. If you can find a way to get a student discount or shop around with third party resellers you may be able to get a better deal. (Sorry for the late reply, just got back from vacation!)
In the Timeline menu there are options for 1 or 2 frame takes, and also a work area take, which you can set manually. So if you really wanted to, you could just record things in 2 frame chunks.
Hi, Im having difficulty with knowing how to move about or resize the puppet in character animator, could you tell me please or let me know if its in one of your videos. thankyou
What scene resolution are you using in Character Animator? It seems that if you have your puppet in a 1920x1080 scene in Ch and then zoom in to a close-up in After Effects like in your last example, the puppet will be greater than 100%. I notice pixelation when I do this sometimes. Is there an optimal scene size you recommend in Ch before importing the scene into Ae?
In CH I will typically go bigger, like 2500 x 2500 or whatever fits the character. Going too big can be overkill and make performance suffer, so sometimes I'll do a scratch recording and try bringing it into my AE scene to see if the sizing is correct before going any deeper.
Dave, if I wanted to create 'non-character' assets like 'fire' or 'smoke' to go into my cartoon, do you recommend building them directly in Character Animator, or would you use something else like Adobe Animate, and then bring them in to composite with the Character Animator footage after the fact?
Character doesn't have native drawing tools, so I would recommend making them somewhere else. Most people use Photoshop and Illustrator to make them, but Animate should be fine too - just export as a PNG sequence.
Hey Dave, I am having and issue with recording into Character Animator. I am wondering if you also ran into this issue. I am recording with a mono condenser microphone, and it seems that character animator has no option to change their default stereo input to mono. Is there something I am missing? Thanks so much for all of your tutorials.
Hmmm good question, I just tried both my USB and internal mic and both seem to show up as mono in the CH audio track when I try to record. If the problem persists, please upload a screenshot or video to the official forums at adobe.com/go/chfeedback so we can take a closer look.
Hi Dave. Thx for your awesome content! Do you know if Character Animator will bring updates to the rigging system to properly rig other body forms than humanoids, like quadrupeds? For work ive been animating ONLY animals for 2 years and every time i tried using Character Animator for it.. it was a brutal hustle and not really worth the headaches, workarounds and compromises.
Nothing to announce now unfortunately - yes, bipedal humans have definitely been the primary focus so far, but this is a very common request we hear. Hopefully we can tackle it in the future.
No, Animate and Character Animator are two separate programs and won't be sharing motion library to my knowledge. Hoping to work on more videos soon, been busy!
As a beginner it would seem that adobe animate would be a natural pairing with character animate, why do you use adobe after effects instead to do your composting?
After Effects and Premiere Pro have dynamic link with Character Animator, while Animate does not. So it's (currently) a more streamlined workflow to use those tools.
Hi. I noticed when I move my eyebrows, the eyebrows on the webcam face tracker marker moves in the opposite direction. Any idea how to correct this? Thanks in advance.
Hard to diagnose here, but my best guess is either in the eyebrow strength parameters under the Face behavior or something is mistagged. If the problem persists, please upload a screenshot, video, or your File > Export > Puppet file to the official forums at adobe.com/go/chfeedback so we can take a closer look.
From After Effects I normally do File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder. Check out ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MUtRnMMOTmo.htmlsi=r7rbrMd7pQd4zFcZ&t=6491 for more info here.
LUA is the language that CH is written in. But I don't believe there are any reasons for users to need to dig into them, so you can safely ignore them.
Sounds like an independent issue. Make sure each view is independent (crown icon). Look at a working example of a head turn character on adobe.com/go/chexamples and try to mimic what they do for independence.
hello Dave. I am very interested in your videos and in Character Animator. Amazing stuff. I have a question regarding the configuration needed to use CA and AE with a mac. I read for example that AE had problems with mac mini M1 and M2. Is it true ? And what is the best configuration in mac to use CA and AE ?( In your video you are using a mac). Thank you for your response and your inspiring videos.
I have not heard anything specific about Mac Minis and AE. In general, I would go by the recommended AE specs - helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/system-requirements.html - if it's good enough for AE, it will be good enough for CH. Personally I use an M1 2021 Macbook Pro and they both work really well!
I'd probably invest in a ring light because that could help for both webcam and other video stuff. In a pinch you can use your phone camera! Also note that CH primarily uses your voice to determine the mouth movements, not the face - but better lighting will help with face / body / pupil tracking!
Great tips. THankyou. In regards to the megascene. When you create the 1920x1080 comps from the megascene...are you then opening that new comp in CH to animate it? I don't see a dynamic link option between AE and CH (I thought there used to be a link?) or are you doing that process differently? If you can show a video of what you do with the resized dupliacetde megascenes and how you use CH with those- It'd be so helpful. Also do you find that these duplicated comps at 1920 x1080 run slow because the art is still very large, even though the comp isn't? Take acre and thanks again for all your great videos
It's a one way street: I go CH > dynamic link to AE. If I need to fix something, I go back to CH, make the fix, and return to AE. CH is pretty much used only for the individual characters - everything else is composited and edited in AE.
As for speed, it's worked okay for me! But some people may prefer to export out each scene and edit in Premiere, which may be faster for some workflows.
I would like to see you do something with action figures similar to robot chicken. Is it possible to 3d scan and import action figures and then rig the limbs for movement?
Yes! Check out the Lego stuff this guy did: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IsUYJjRpGDk.html. It's not 3D - it will always be a flat PSD or AI file - but it works pretty well!
@@okaysamurai so if I understand correctly, the action figure would be digitally scanned (photographed) and imported as a flat 2d image in Photoshop and then each part would be split up to enable easy rigging in Character animator? The 3d illusion or effect can be gotten through using different angles of the action figure. Am I Correct or is there something I'm missing?
Yep exactly. You could take a photo of anything in any view and if you label and organize it a certain way, it will work in CH. This video might help: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-thDlCEuLzuY.html
Hi again Samurai, Im having an issue with my characters mouth, it seems to flicker on and off every now and then on the record screen, do you know what may be causing this?
Usually a flicker like this is due to a missing mouth shape. I would record something and see if there is a consistent viseme where the mouth disappears on playback. If the problem persists, please upload a screenshot, video, or your File > Export > Puppet file to the official forums at adobe.com/go/chfeedback so we can take a closer look.
Thanks, Dave! Flexibility versus Performance was one of the biggest issues for me but in the end it really pays off to have large Puppets for Close-Up Shots. I noticed that with one puppet of mine that has quite a lot of angles and cycle layers that the performance dropped to something around 10-12 frames for playback. It's not too horrible, coming from After Effects with extensive render times and sometimes impossible playback, but I was wondering - are there any tools/options to enhance performance? Just noticed that in Character Animator there are barely any controllable settings. No render-preview or half or quarter quality function. Regarding the lip-sync transcript: Does it work well with any language? Or only with English?
For performance, other than AE preview options and the PNG thing I talk about here, not really. Yes, I wish CH had a draft mode or something. I will say that I recently worked with a professional broadcast studio using CH + AE very similar to this workflow, and switching to the PNG sequence helped them tremendously. For lip sync transcript, yes, currently it is English only, but we hope to expand it in the future.
@@okaysamurai Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, a draft mode would be great! But the performance is still quite impressive, I'd say, especially with large-scaled puppets. Yeah, PNG is still the best pre-render option, agree, no matter what software. I always export my CH Scenes to a PNG sequence even if it's just to watch them smoothly in After Effects. Alright, so it makes sense, why the Italian transcript was not really improving the lip sync. I guess I just go with the audio-compute-lip-sync and edit them accordingly.
question in order to animate you have to know how to draw? I don’t know how to do it but I like to use After effect and a bit of character animator I wonder How could be the process to create some cartoon if I can’t draw
Hello sir I am huge fan of your work I created a puppet and in that puppet there are lots of facial expressions I want to use those facial expressions while playing games on live stream so can Adobe have a hot ki setup or something like a secondary keyboard or something can you please help me with that.
Currently we require CH to be the active window for keyboard triggers to work. MIDI controls, however, should still work regardless. Other than that, many streamers use a two computer setup for gaming - one for games and one for their character.
Some people like to include a draggable handle in their head origin, which allows them to drag it to add bounce to a character. You could do the same and record draggin the up and down motion to get the head bop effect.
