Character Animator

Hello Character Animators! I'm working on a character and adding layers and elements as I go.  (Trying to build out some nice cycle layers sets for visemes etc.)  My current work flow is Adobe Illustrator exported to PSD and into Character Animator.  It seems like 90% of the time any updates I make work as expected and about 10% of the time for some reason all of my character rigging and edits disappear after updates. I cannot seem to narrow down what kind of changes are causing this.  My questions are, is this a known issue and is there a way to save or copy the character rigging and settings separatley so I can reapply them to the puppet when this happens? Thanks in advance for any guidance you can share!

Hi, I'm creating a puppet with a walk behavior that also is able to do head turns while walking. I have modeled it off of the "Walker" puppet from OkSamurai. It has 5 separate views (for five body directions), each containing a body and a head (with the head also having 5 separate views). After tagging and rigging to match the Walker puppet, it seems as though I cannot get the puppet's head features to remain fixed and stable. They end up distorting wildly when the puppet begins walking. It is particularly noticable as the hair layer, (which is not independent) moves off the head, as well as the eyes moving around. The only way i've been able to get the distortion down is to reduce the walking strength down to less than 10%, which makes it look like there isn't any walking. Is there a tagging/rigging procedure that I can follow to keep head features from warping?Any advice is appreciated.Thanks.

Ok, so I've watched the video on mixing animation with reality, and understand the basics of motion tracking in AE.  I have a scenario where my real-world subject has a character on her shoulder, and because of the nature of her movements, slight shoulder dips, head turns and all, I'm looking to make the character respond more naturally to its environment.  Meaning, if she dips her shoulder a bit, he would respond to that gravitational pull a bit, etc.  Using the physics tutorial, I guess I could create an imaginary floor that the character stands on, and animate that floor alongside a png sequence in CH?  Because the movements are so subtle and random, it feels like I would have to animate like 3 frames at a time to get it to sync up.  That's crazy. I'm just wondering if there is any advice on a workflow, and how you would go about accomplishing something like this.  Thank you so much!

hi~.. Notebooks webcams work normally in Windows.But I can only see 'waiting for the camera' in character animator, and the camera screen doesn't come out. What should I do? Help me....

I'm still a novice, and I've been struggling with the pupils on multiple puppets where the pupils stray off. I was previously trying to make a pupil range layer and cover it with a different shaped eye, but only once I reduced the camera strength to 2% did it stay in the eye ball. I decided to just make literally the most basic one from scratch with regular identical white eyeballs and black pupils but still the pupils keep running off.  I thought I was getting the hang of rigging and tagging all the parts correctly! Also, while I'm sharing it, is there anything special I need to do with puppets that share the same head and body? Thanks for reading! https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_I6AkEo4QEHcqBSDA7eyZg5pMm71UDNI

i ma unable to open Character Animator, it is showing this error, help please ?

Hi,So I created 3 different faces in one PSD file and wanted to use a swap set, so I'd have a default face, happy face, and angry face.With so many layers for 3 faces, I was running into issues with eyebrows not working if I had more than one layer with "eyebrow" written in it.So in the end I saved each face as a different file and created a puppet for each of them. So my question is, with 3 puppets in one scene, how do I create a swap set showing one character at a time?When I go to the rig section, I can only click on one puppet at a time to create a swap set.Look forward to your reply!! Best,Bryce

In my walk behavior,my legs are not sticking to the Body. I`m quadriplegic and got some difficultis.Can you please look in to the files and help me. https://transferxl.com/08Y7KB85H4Bps

While trying to animate my puppet, Although I want my body to move with my head, my body is will not stay in place at all and my head will only turn, but not move side to side. My eyeballs also do not move with my head. If someone could provide me with assistance that would be great. Files included for reference.

I have made octopus feet and when I go to record mode, the feet strectch far more than I want them to. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. Also, dont worry about my guy....

Hi,New to community and love what this program can do but I've encountered an issue. I thought it would be fun to have the character explain.https://youtu.be/aOqSqHHEHQM I'd like the head to stay still and only have the eyes and mouth move. Any help would be appreciated. I've searched through the forums but not finding anything similar. And here's an image of my settings

Hello all! You are all rockstars! Especially Dave from Okay Samurai. I can't seem to get my head attached to the neck... When I try to walk forward with the body, the head stays put. Both crowns are unchecked and I'm almost 100% positive everything is where ist should be. Please help! 

If I have a midi backing tracks file for drums, is it possible to import the .mid file in Character to animate audio triggeable puppet directly by this file ? I don't have any midi board, I just can find .mid file for drums and guitars. I'd like to use it to animate musician puppets. If it's not yet possible, could it be a future developpment ? Thanks for your answer.

Hey so my puppet's eyes are working as usual however when I either look up or down the pupils move in opposite directions, however when I look left and right everything is fine. I've tried making the pupil range substantially bigger than the pupil range but this doesn't do anything. Thanks!

Hi, I need advice regarding the use of stock characters from Character Animator. I'd like to record YouTube videos featuring the stock characters but I'm not sure how to cite them or if we can even use them in our videos. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

I have checked all settings I am aware of and I cannot solve this. The internal mic on my imac works with everything else but not with CA. Can anyone help before I totally give up

I just did a walk behavior and the background is moving off screen with my puppet. I've tried what I thought would fix it but am lost at this point. The puppet is in it's own folder and so is the background.

Hi,I imported CHAD puppet into Character Animator and would like to edit it in illustrator. When I click on edit original it takes me to photoshop. Is there a way to get it open in illustrator instead?

Hi there! I've been editing my character in Illustrator with the Character Animator app open, but when I save the character in Illustrator and it updates in Animator, my character won't move with my face on the webcam. I tried using a pre-existing character to see if my webcam was maybe broken, but it's functioning fine.  I noticed that when I'm in the "Rig" section, I don't see all the layers of my character- just "Layer 1", but it doesn't expand to anything. Any suggestions? Thank you!

Edit: I fixed it.  I found one of Okay Samurai's videos where he addressed this specific issue.  My "Head" was "+Head" making it independent of the body.  I'm still not sure why the body could not be pinned down, but that's a question for another time.  I've left the original text below in case this problem shows up for anyone else. The two sample characters Anime Rin and Wizard Heather are torsos with hair behind the shoulders.  I'd like to do the same with my character, Nick. I'm not sure if that's important or not, but it seems that the Neck element has to be part of the Head element. YouTube videos are a great help for much of this, but I just cannot seem to get this one simple function to work.Yes, I'm a noob.  This is my first puppet.  I removed most of what I didn't need to keep this one problem isolated. The head, neck, and body float when I make the AI layer a part of the Head group:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZIpzLSDsMPI3

I used character animator for a week and everything worked, but now when I try to record or play, it just doesnt work. I even tried to use some premade characters, and nothing would record or play. I can still build my puppet, and everything else seems to work.  I uninstalled and reinstalled to no avail. I made sure updates were current. I'm just stuck, help!

Hello everyone, I'm using Character Animator with two different camera capture tools (Mokose USB3.0 HDMI/SDI Video Capture Card and Magewell USB Capture HDMI) and getting the same results: my video has the wrong aspect ratio. The camera feed appears "squished" in 4:3 mode, when it should be 16:9. I've used both of these capture tools with other software (Wirecast, for example), and they work just fine there. In the screenshot below, you'll see how the video is squished. I'm holding a roll of tape, which should be perfectly round; instead, it's oval shaped. I can't find any setting in CA to change this. And when I switch to my computer's FaceTime camera, the video output appears normal (4:3 aspect ratio, but not "squished."). Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong here? Thanks in advance for everyone's help. -Brian

I am teaching 2nd graders and want to do this for Zoom. I've seen EXCELLENT tutorials on YouTube and have everything up and running great on a MacBook Pro. HOWEVER...since the puppet's mouth is triggered by my voice(headset mic), I see that the puppet's mouth moves to ANY AUDIO, like music, or sound effects or the kids on the Zoom call. How can I have the puppet speak when I do and still be able to hear the kids without their sounds moving the character's mouth? Thanks!

HiNew to this so I'm still finding my way round.I need 3 - 5 characters which are ready to go in Character Animator so I can create some very short pieces to add to a training video. I'm a trainer not an animator but I've used iMovie a lot so I am familiar with the timeline and how the tracks interact.What I'm not familiar with is character creation, so I'm looking for a source so that I can simply import them to Animator and then animate them using the facial mocap.Can anyone point me in the right direction please?Thanks in advanceSteve