Feature Requests

We would love a pocket version of Character Animator, to use on iPad or iphone. There are no programs offering this feature with AI real time animation. Adobe, please create it!

Add the ability to key, animate, or fine tune recorded performances. Make everything that moves, or triggers keyframable.

You could add more functionalities for smoothing animations, for example mouth animations.

Characterizer system is awesome but, it has trouble recognizing and masking a couple of things like beards and certain skin tones even with lighting.The capture process is incredibly useful though and it would be awesome to be able to send those initial captures to photoshop to do things like edit what is masked out, manually draw faces based on the captures, and manipulate the captures themselves.ORat a minimum add a step between the captures and characterization where you can tell characterizer what it should see as face, head hair, facial hair, etc. Similar to the process when adding a source for characterizer to use on the image captures.

Photoshop/Illustrator Layer colors to Character Animator.

Would be nice to be able to scale the track size vertically in the timeline like Premiere's behavior.

As far as I can see I can't find the option to make a shortcut for just dragging around the timeline (similar to the hand/drag tool in Premiere); I saw the "M" thing, but it doesn't seem to be that responsive. It would be sweet if you could right click on an empty space in your scene timeline and that would just drag the entire timeline. Adversely, it could be ctrl+ click, or alt+ click. Just the option would be nice.

I cannot use live action animation, because I'm too disabled.However, I would like to develop a character to represent me and read my post. I know I can bring in an audio file, but can I then animate the face, rather that just a fixed face with just the mouth moving? Hope this makes sense?

I have a USB camera using EOS Webcam Utility as its driver. Many other applications on my computer can find and use this webcam with no problem (such as zoom, skype, chrome, default camera app, OBS studio, etc...) however character animator can not find this camera. Also, OBS studio is running virtual-cams that are also seen by every application (see list above) except character animator.System info    Application: Character Animator v3.3.1.6    OS: Windows v10.0.18363, RAM: 31.94 GB, CPUs (logical): 8

If you change a source clip's name or location, there is no way to rightclick > replace, which is a pain if you have a bigger project

I would like to be able to prerecord an actor talking and moving and have character animator analyse their movement and sync the lips and movements.

I need to have more control over the parallax feature. As I've seen suggested multiple times here, the ultimate solution would be something like Joysticks and Sliders- the script for AE from aescripts.com. If that's not possible, I'd at least like control over X and Y strength. I really just want X movement, but there doesn't seem to be a way to control this. I'd also like the option of being able to drag the parallax around with the mouse rather than having to turn my head. In practice, physically turning your head to the side is pretty hard if you need the character to stay there while you do other actions. Then you can't see what you're doing until you look straight again!

Adding a hand-tool (press spacebar, just like in AE) to drag the timeline horizontally. Thats a convenient way to navigate.

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.