Character Animator

I seem to be unable to wrap my brain around triggers and swap sets (especially with cycle layers active).So, I want the claw to open and close with one layer in-between. The layers have the cycle layer behavior added and set up (correctly??)But when I go to "record" the crab I don't see the initial arm until I press "A," my trigger key.I've tried swap sets... and their deep mysterious difference from triggers--still no luck.What am I doing wrong?Thanks in advance!

just my luck, my video uploaded without sound, so you have no idea what im saying... i made an animation with physics applied to show what happens when a blood clot blocks a vessel, trying to save it as a video and get it in after effects to include in a video project im working on for school. the blood clot particle shows up like it should when i click, but it doesnt show up in the video that i export... whats up with that? if anyone could explain what im missing id really appreciate it!character animator question - YouTube

Hi there!I'm really enjoying a lot of the new features introduced in 2.1 but, for me, the live lip sync is progressively getting worse with each update. Is there a specific file I can copy over from a previous version of Character Animator that will return the lip sync to how it was in a previous build, without losing the new features introduced in 2.1?Thanks

I am trying to create a clipping mask for some glare on these glasses. Is this possible? It seems the mask needs to be a solid color and I'm not sure how to use the clipping mask without being a solid color.  This is one solid gray color shape behind the frames. My setup here. How it should look here in Illustrator

Hi all,I was wondering if it's possible to change the button size  in the controls panel? The ones with the thumbnails in it.I find the button's very small. I want to put some text in the thumbnails for a quick view at what the trigger does, but it's very hard to read now. Thank's in advance!

Hello All, We took a puppet we were working with and changed some of the colors of some layers in Illustrator. The issue now is when I import the illustrator file it has lost all of the setup information. Is there a way to copy the setup information from one character to another when they are 100% the same (Other than some of the layer colors) Is there a way I can export the puppet and work on the artwork without losing the IK and all the setup info? Thanks,Baxter

My puppet designed in AI has separate layers for the arms.1. When in the Timeline, sometimes I am able to click and drag on each arm and sometimes I am not able to. What needs to be done to make sure I can always drag on the arms?2. When recording I can move one arm at a time. How would you record an animation where the puppet is moving both arms at the same time?Thanks.

I'm trying to do face tracking on Character animator, but the webcam panel is blank. I tried the next/default cams and nothing different. I did however update from beta to 2018 version this week.  My mac specs are:What's missing anybody? I need help.

Hello,After this month with new update Character Animator's Lip Sync not work very well. As in pictures some places jumping, no visemes.by the way sounds is clear , no background noise or audio!For repair these places  i press record(while Stereo Mix open) than missing viseme fixed. But it makes me Tired always always fix missing visemes. Please help meagain by the way before was great work and i tried another characters. it my  game channel Бабушка Шошо Игры - YouTubeAmy_Wong​Woojin​Debbie​clawson​mghalpin​Jochem van Dieten​Marilynlee17​theblair​azilaga​Character Animator​Character Animator (2.1) new features (video)​@

Hello!I'm fairly new to Character Animator, this is my first try rigging a character. I'm working on a Superman puppet for fun, also learning about rigging along the way. I've been following the great tutorials by Okay Samurai and everything has been going great until I wanted to rig the arms. For some reason the arm won't be highlighted, it's just a box, which means none of the features for making the arm bend and animate properly works, I just get the bendy "stretch armstrong" arms I've added some photos to show what it looks like in rigging mode. Does anyone know where the problem lies?

I'm having problems with the program crashing every time I try and enter Rig mode.First, I imported my character after tweaking the blank template (Illustrator), and added it to a new scene. If I click the Rig tab on the top bar, or double click the puppet to enter Rig mode, the app closes. No crash report, nothing. . .Upon re-opening Character Animator, it of course creates a new project (I find this quite annoying, is there anyway to stop that?) and I can re-open the project with my previously imported character. The same thing occurs when navigating away from the Record mode. I can go to Start, Stream (even though i don't intend to use it), and back to Record mode, but Rig seems to always crash.I have uninstalled Character Animator and reinstalled from the Creative Cloud launcher to ensure most recent version.Windows 10intel i5 2.5 ghz16 g RAMIs anyone else experiencing the same problem or know of the issue I'm having? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Just loving the new Replay feature!Is there a way to set a Replay to cycle forever or maybe to loop and only be stopped with a trigger?My issue:I use the Breathe behavior, but I need it to move the head up and down (offset) as well as the chest.As it currently is set up, the head stays lock solid unaffected by the Breathe behavior.So, my sorta-fix is to animate my own head up and down (in unison to the Breathe timing), make it into a Replay and then to trigger it in unison with the torso breath. But, I need it to loop/cycle forever.Is that a feature request?Thanks in advance,

My character's arms were stretching despite having Arm IK. I tried applying the Arm IK behaviour Arm ID to the character, the body, even the arms.  I was testing whether it was working by trying to stretch the arms. It still wouldn't work. I watched the tutorial several times and triple checked the rigging. Finally, more by luck than good management, a solution.I had been testing by dragging the hands. When I dragged by the wrists, everything worked and the arms would only stretch to the expected 10% default.

Hi everyone! I have a puppet for which the body and the head are a single shape (as Face bg). I would like to have draggable arms, but they would have the origin in the common body/head shape. Is there a way to make that happen? Cheers!

I've got a puppet that I've been working on and tweaking for a while and some time in the last two weeks, i must have tweaked some parameter that's causing there to be a delay in the movement of the puppet when I'm using camera input. So if I move my head to the right, about a second and a half later the puppet moves, rather than moving in real time with my movement.I have searched the CA help section to no avail, I'm not even sure where to look for this control or what it might be called. I've tried tweaking the smoothing parameters, got the minimum pose duration to 0.I feel like I'm missing something obvious. What am I missing? Where should I look?

Hello,I added arm IK to my new puppet. Where the shoulder connects seemed a little weird to me, it bends at an awkward angle like this: it just looks weird to me. Like the shoulder shouldn't bend like that. I moved up the stick that kept the forearm straight and the dent got smaller, but still noticeable to me. Maybe it's too nitpick-y but I wanted to change so I switched the attach mode on the right arm group to Henge. It looks like this: it looks much more natural, despite the fact that I need to smooth things out on my art work, however Arm IK doesn't work any more. Or I should say auto-bend. It's still selected however the arms doesn't automatically switch the the other side. So I was wondering if there is a way to make arm IK work with Hinge mode? I unchecked auto-bend and tried using reverse bend left & reverse bend right, but neither of those worked either.

Searching for the answers in the forums really isn't efficient because people tend to phrase their questions in vague terms, so even if the answer is out there, it's extremely hard to find and more often than not, it's hard to understand. So when I figure out a way to do a task or fix a problem, I'm going to post a "how to". I learn best with visuals, so the more screenshots, the better. Help out the community and add one or two of your own!This one was driving me crazy and I couldn't find a clear answer that worked. When recording the "Face", the smile would flash when I didn't want it to and wouldn't show up when I did want it to. So put a trigger on it, right? Not that simple. There's a whole hierarchy of layers and naming items properly (another "How To" for another time) that's hard to understand for dummies like me. What I finally figured out, thanks to trying some things that alank99101739​ described, is that you have to put the Mouth viseme group inside of another group (or lay

How do I find this?I downloaded the 2.1 version but it just has dragger and eye gaze etcnot the Arm IK.

How can I do a smoke sequence from a cigarette in character animator using the particles behaviour.I’m completely confused and I’ve even watched the tutorials many times I can’t figure it out. How can I have small particles going up continuously?I don’t want to do a cycle behaviour I want to do a particle behaviour.Your help would be deeply appreciated. Help !

This issues has happened before. A layer appears differently (moved) on the CH stage, but appears to be in the correct position in AI and in CH rig window. Changing the position in CH rig window does not move where the layer is rendered in CH stage.You'll see the gap between the eyelid and rest of eye in the CH recording stage image. This persists with vector rendering on or off and at all resolutions. Also tried moving the lid layer in AI to a newly created layer as this has helped before. No luck.Image shows it best:

So I recently made a puppet in illustrator but for some reason whenever I import her into Character Animator, parts of her body are missing, specifically her shoulder/shirt sleeve area. (I can't take a picture at this time)I have a clipping mask over it to give it a stripe through the sleeve. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with what's causing this. Like it shows up fine in the Illustrator file, but when I import it into Character Animator the sleeves are missing and the clipping masked stripe only shows up.any ideas of how to fix this?

My puppet keeps looking away from the camera for no apparent reason. I have set the eyes up to look around but the right eye has insisted on going WAY off. I have worked most of the afternoon trying to get the eyes to behave. I have had some luck with the left eye but no luck at all with the right. The left eye moves off a little at the same time as the right but it is less extreme. Can anyone tell me how to fix this?

When I scale a puppet (bigger), is this a vector based process? I can't tell visually if this is the case. When I scale up - for instance, to have the puppet's face fill the scene - the lines still look pretty good, but I'd like to know for sure.I also wonder this because if I decide to make the dimensions of my scene 4K instead of 1920x1080, the scene gets bigger, but the puppet size does not adjust relative to that change. It is smaller in the scene, so I have to scale the puppet up. Or, should I be increasing the size of the puppet in AI and relinking?thx

my mouth animation still works, yes, but it can't seem to decide which mouth it is. is there a way of improving that?

This is really a cross-CH/AE question, but it pertains to both and there are bound to be other people trying similar things in the near future.The first render I did took 22 hours, so I'm assuming there are several things I did wrong along the way. Hopefully the answers to these questions will save me and many others a lot of time.Question 1: We're making ten 15 minute videos (without cuts--basically a "live" single camera shoot from the front). Practically speaking, they're the same as the "Just Dance" video game, except we aren't rotoscoping, we're just chromakeying and putting animated vectors in the background. In the videos there are eight or so 2 minute songs that have different choreography--the puppet, more or less, does the choreography, as well. My thought was that it would be less taxing on the system and easier to deal with the multiple dragger layers if I broke each song up into different scenes. Then I used Dynamic Link to bring them each into AE. Would it help render tim