Open for Voting
Character Animator needs documentation and logical tools for people who make puppets
Character Animator needs documentation and logical tools for people who make puppets. It currently is the worst workflow I have every experienced.
Trying to do anything innovative and outside the specs of the premade puppets is a freaking nightmare. It's like navigating a landmine without a metal detector. 90% of my time is trying logical processes that end up failing almost everytime. Spending weeks to get simple processes to work together like walk and limb ik is just a struggle because the CA team didn't account for the fact that users would want a puppet with several behaviors together.
Unfortunately almost everything is tied in to the same functions and all sorts of conflicts occur.
a list of the annoyances so far.
1. Head turn and walk requires a workaround - neck to be added to head instead of body. this causes limb ik issues.
2. Shareable puppets require behaviors in the shareable rather than the root of the puppet. Shareable heads end up with tons of redundant behaviors. 1 for each view.
3. So many videos by Werner have incorrect info. Took 3 days to realize that my limb ik wasn't working because I followed Dave's instruction. Once I tried adding handles to the body instead of legs, everything worked. This misinformation has occurred many times.
4. Mirroring!!!! WTF can't we just flip a view and reuse it with all of its handles, etc? The swap left and right does not work correctly for every part. Also, making a shareable and flipping it prevents swapping left and right as it will also adjust the original. This is the worst oversight/lack of feature in the app.
5. Optimization. Documentation for the suggested rig specs (non minimum, but pro use), as well as documentation on best practices (file sizes, handle limitations, etc) to avoid low FPS.
6. Walk cycles - when using the head turn and walk behavior trick, if your head is tilted, you get a stutter/warping when initiated.
7. Bring back the staple feature. Seems like it has gotten alot harder to chain parts together than it was back in 2017. I used to be able to make a leg with thigh, calf, and foot and have each part hinge. I cannot seem to be able to do this anymore with the provided tooling.
8. Why isn't there more logical building structure options? Why aren't there symbols like in Animate CC with options. Why can't repeated parts just be a callout to 1 singular part like in object oriented programming?
9. The biggest problem!!!! Why is every process so incredibly slow in CA? I have i9, 6700xt (12gb), 48gb ram, 2 m2 drives, and every action in CA takes about 5 -10 seconds. (no, the error checker is not open) Just clicking a crown, hitting undo, deleting something... literally every freaking action. It's obvious to me that CA is bottlenecking itself. Not sure if it's because it's a single core app (which is dumb), or if there are just alot of bloat in the coding like every other Adobe app.
I have spent (no lie) thousands of hours with CA just puppet making (I could have rigged up characters, manually did lip sync, etc in after effects by now). CA does not make animating easier. Again, to reiterate, I spend 80% of the time trying playing the trial and error game in CA, rather than creating.
Trying to do anything innovative and outside the specs of the premade puppets is a freaking nightmare. It's like navigating a landmine without a metal detector. 90% of my time is trying logical processes that end up failing almost everytime. Spending weeks to get simple processes to work together like walk and limb ik is just a struggle because the CA team didn't account for the fact that users would want a puppet with several behaviors together.
Unfortunately almost everything is tied in to the same functions and all sorts of conflicts occur.
a list of the annoyances so far.
1. Head turn and walk requires a workaround - neck to be added to head instead of body. this causes limb ik issues.
2. Shareable puppets require behaviors in the shareable rather than the root of the puppet. Shareable heads end up with tons of redundant behaviors. 1 for each view.
3. So many videos by Werner have incorrect info. Took 3 days to realize that my limb ik wasn't working because I followed Dave's instruction. Once I tried adding handles to the body instead of legs, everything worked. This misinformation has occurred many times.
4. Mirroring!!!! WTF can't we just flip a view and reuse it with all of its handles, etc? The swap left and right does not work correctly for every part. Also, making a shareable and flipping it prevents swapping left and right as it will also adjust the original. This is the worst oversight/lack of feature in the app.
5. Optimization. Documentation for the suggested rig specs (non minimum, but pro use), as well as documentation on best practices (file sizes, handle limitations, etc) to avoid low FPS.
6. Walk cycles - when using the head turn and walk behavior trick, if your head is tilted, you get a stutter/warping when initiated.
7. Bring back the staple feature. Seems like it has gotten alot harder to chain parts together than it was back in 2017. I used to be able to make a leg with thigh, calf, and foot and have each part hinge. I cannot seem to be able to do this anymore with the provided tooling.
8. Why isn't there more logical building structure options? Why aren't there symbols like in Animate CC with options. Why can't repeated parts just be a callout to 1 singular part like in object oriented programming?
9. The biggest problem!!!! Why is every process so incredibly slow in CA? I have i9, 6700xt (12gb), 48gb ram, 2 m2 drives, and every action in CA takes about 5 -10 seconds. (no, the error checker is not open) Just clicking a crown, hitting undo, deleting something... literally every freaking action. It's obvious to me that CA is bottlenecking itself. Not sure if it's because it's a single core app (which is dumb), or if there are just alot of bloat in the coding like every other Adobe app.
I have spent (no lie) thousands of hours with CA just puppet making (I could have rigged up characters, manually did lip sync, etc in after effects by now). CA does not make animating easier. Again, to reiterate, I spend 80% of the time trying playing the trial and error game in CA, rather than creating.
AdChoices