Character Animator

For cut-out animation styles (e.g. South Park type) it would be good to be able to turn off joint stretch/distortion while still being able to use IK/draggers.I know there are various workarounds to be able to get a similar thing, but it would be good to have the option to just have each of the limb sprites retain their exact shape while moving their arms/legs.

A double toggle or transparency of when certain behaviors are enabled. i.e; "Triggers". Show like an onion skin of both on and off effects. Similar to the snapshot feature but instead it transparent throughout the entire timeline. The "dragger" behavior would definitely benefit from this. Or better yet, a second "scene" window showing all the animation if all the behaviors were toggled off and another with the behaviors toggled on.

My puppets are many layered and large which I know creates a drag on resources. The frame rate slowing is not usually much of an issue - except today as I'm working on lipsyncing. In this particular area, I do want frame accurate playback. Visemes not aligning with speech is very noticeable... it's hard to get it right when the frame rate is playing back at 50%.What I have been doing is dynamically linking to AE with composition set to play all frames. The render is bearable and I can see what needs tweaking.My wonder is, can CH have a feature where we could render in the timeline so that playback is at full frame rate? As I understand, CH is trying to render in real time as this is a major part of the application, but is wait-and-see render possible? Even better if the render could be a particular area using the Work Area.

Does Ch support clipping masks that have already been created inside of Adobe Illustrator or do you have to recreate them inside Ch?

It would be nice to have the option to output a scene in realtime as a 'virtual camera', so that it can be properly imported into streaming programs such as OBS.As of now, my current method is to use "Window Capture" of Character Animator, but it captures all of the GUI as well, and it's kind of laggy on a Mac computer.

The problem i'm having right now with creating different emotion sets (sad, confused, happy etc.) is that it's something very basic and important, yet time consuming and complicated to do on a live performance.my idea is:if we could somehow for example, connect between the "smile" behavior that the camera tracks from the face, and connect it to other elements created for a smile set like eyebrows, eyes, cheeks etc. which will be triggered automatically.if you make a sad/smile/surprised face, the camera detects it and automatically triggers sad eyes, eyebrows, maybe even body poses!basic emotions that are very important for the performance, automatically by the camera, without needing to create complex sets of triggers, key binds etc.Just a thought 🙂

It would be nice to scale the entire scene (and all its sub-scenes/puppets) to any scale. For example, I have a master scene which contains many puppets and everything is in vector. I am working in a 1920x1080 resolution and everything is made for this resolution. It would be nice though since everything is in vector to be able to scale the project up to 4k for example (same aspect ratio) and now have a 4k vector animation of this too done very easily. 4k+ is very slow in character animator to work with which is why I use 1920x1080. I know it is then possible to scale up after but that means I would have to go in and scale everything up manually which would be tedious.

In the control section for triggers, in layout you can drag the icons to where you want, and you can even drag one icon on top of another, but, when you press it, it still only triggers one of the icons. It would be great if you could layer icons on top of each other, and then you only have to press the one to trigger them all at once. The reason for this is because if you create a trigger group, all the actions in that group has to be the same lengh in frames, otherwise it causes bits to disappear. Sometimes you need different lenghs of animation within one trigger. For example. If a character get mad, he may pull a scrowl in 5 frames, but the smoke coming from his ears might run for 10+. I know that you can get around this by making each of them a individual trigger with the same key to trigger, but it would be great if it could work on the touch screen too.

CH only have parallax effect for eyes and nose. wish to have it for mouth too.

I want to be able to link dynamically with after effects, but the linked animation has blurry edges and not hard pixels that I need.For instance part of the aesthetic is that my animations are low resolution, with pixilated edges. I cannot use character animator unless there is an option to export or link using a "draft" quality, such as in AE. Please give us a hard pixel export option (no anti aliasing)

Wishlist, with Create Trigger dropzone - Would be great if there was one that created both a Trigger and add Cycle Layers Behavior.Would also love a way to set Cycle Layers, Triggers, Bones, and Attach from layer names in Illustrator and Photoshop. (Similar to independent.)Sometimes I have to restructure my puppet and it’s tough having to re-rig when plans change.Inverse kinematics – Similar to the after effects riggin plugin DUIK, adding more realistic control to limbs. Makes them only bend one wayLove any shortcuts that keep things from becoming repetitive.

Using Physics and Magnets, when I go to do the performance, at the end of the performance, Character Animator stops and leaves the character in the final position. When I rewind, not all items are reset to neutral/default. Consequently, if you then play back again... everything is shifted starting from a new neutral.Ideally there should be an option to either keyframe the "reset" OR a way to keyframe ALL items in the initial frame (or maybe frame (-1.0) )Anything so we don't have to every time remember to click "reset"Note - this is particularly bad when exporting to media encoder. A Playback should be identical and consistent between recordings if nothing has changed.

Adding the functionality of scale and rotate mesh that is in After Effects advanced puppet pin tool to allow for greater creativity in Character Animator.

Hi I really love the new Puppet Maker but can you add new things? It will be awesome if you update for new things and for hats can you add a hijab? Good Job Character Animator Team👍❤️

The interface color NEEDS to have options! It is way, way too dark! !

You should be able to simply COPY the assets on a scene and PASTE into another. Or simply DUPLICATE A SCENE!

Like in After Effects I think it would be beneficial to see at once which parameters can be animated via keyframes with grey stop watch icons that are visible all the time and not only with mouse over.As Dave says in the tutorial video for key framing it is a bit of a “trial and error thing” – you want to make it easier for users as character animation is a lot of work already. Thanks!

I would love to see support for the velocity of a key press from a MIDI keyboard or pad. Often the nutcracker jaw and other lip sync does not follow the words very well, so having the ability to control the jaw with a key/button press on a MIDI keyboard would be great. If I tap lightly, the jaw opens a little, and if I tap hard, the jaw opens wide. Maybe this behavior could also be mapped to feet, so you could make a character dance just by tapping two different buttons.

Not sure why the keys associated for triggers are limited to numbers and letters on the keyboard. I ought to be able to use other keyboard characters or even combinations of keystrokes to execute various triggers. I know I can add more using MIDI but that seems kind of silly when there are still so many keys on the keyboard that should be able to be programmed for trigger use.

I like being able to latch triggers and end with "stop/sustain" so my characters can hold a pose with the push of a button. But I don't like having to unlatch the trigger before executing a new trigger. I would like move from one stop/sustained trigger to another without having to unlatch in-between. Basically I want my triggers to override and any latched behavior so I can move from one dynamic pose or motion directly into another.

Please make Ch compatible with the GoPro Webcam utility

Please update to allow the background to be made transparent so the animation can be layered on top of presentations or other projects. Camtasia has this function and I don't want to use Camtasia solely for this function. It would be great if this function could be added. Thank you

I've noticed quite a few problems using the camera with a full (and dark color) beard. This causes two problems.First, the software seems to confuse my mouth and my beard hair.Second, the software can't recognize the bottom of my chin. This makes sense, but it keeps jumping from the bottom of my mouth to the bottom of the beard. This tricks the software into thinking that I'm rapidly moving towards and away from the camera. This could be fixed by using eye and nose tracking to triangulate the position and calculate the scale of the face in relation to the sides of the head.I really enjoy having an epic beard and don't want to shave it so I can use this software to its fullest.

Be able to easily import pre-recorded video of someone speaking to control characters facial movements.