Can you hold in place after recording for frame by frame animation?

Question

Hello! I am loving the speed at which we can animate using Adobe Character Animator, but for those times I need to refine a specific movement or pose is it possible to use the "hold in place" feature of the dragger behavior to do frame by frame animation without it jumping back to its original position after recording?

Currently, I have both my characters arms independently assigned to separate "dragger" behaviors (right arm & left arm). If I want to refine a movement with my character's left arm, I toggle the left arm's dragger behavior from "return to rest" to "hold in place." I can then position my characters arm to the right position (which is great!), but when I hit Command-1 and it animates a single frame, my character's arm jumps back to it's original position and I have to start over again and try to guess where the last position was so I can animate another single frame. I can always scrub back on the timeline and see where I left off and try to get the arm back into a similar position but that is time intensive and not as precise as I would like.

I would love to have it stay in its current position after I record a single frame, so I can move it slightly and then animate another single frame again. Is something like that possible?

Thanks!

Thomas

alank99101739 · Answer

This might be a good one for the “feature request” area. I tried a few options like turning off the recording to work out the current values, but you have to go back a frame as well. (So you could turn off recording, go back a frame, work out new positions in your head, go forward a frame, go back into record mode, position things, record that, ... ugly!)

I think you really want a fourth mode (stop, play, record, and stop-frame-recording). For stop-frame recording I agree you want to see exactly what the previous frame was so you can adjust it. When scrubbing through the timeline in this new mode I guess it should also show the previous frame all the time. This is a mode purely for stop frame recording. (You could get fancy and show the current and previous N frames as transparencies or something...)

(I was wondering if something like this possibly useful for general scrubbing if you want to adjust (overwrite) a draggable. But because there is no key-framing, its probably easier just to re-record that section. It can however be tricky to get the position exactly right if you want to override part of a longer scene, but blending might help there (start the recording a little early and blend into the new real start value). Personally I would like to be able to see and adjust recorded values in a drag - but it really is a request for keyframing draggables rather than what is currently there. E.g. do a single frame record of a draggable (and scale and Position X,Y transforms) every so often, and have CH blend between those single frames. You can do it with blends today, but its rather awkward. But the point is there is a similar problem - you want to know the current values and easily record over them - but going into record mode resets things to defaults for the armed values, making adjustments harder.)

Hmmm. Another idea. (Maybe stupid.) Have a record mode where you see the current frame values. Then new stop-frame record command to move cursor forward before recording the new value. That would then be useful with scrubbing and stop frame recording.

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