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Harmonious_mind0101
Participant
October 25, 2019
Question

Character Animator takes a LONG time to load between commands

  • October 25, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 822 views

Whenever I import my character from AI, it takes a long time to import and process commands when clicking something (e.g. selecting a body part during the rigging process takes somewhere between 3-5mins for the loading wheel to stop spinning). And just selecting the record section ends up crashing the app so I have to force quit it.


Using the templates work fine, which are around 400kb. However, my character file is 10.1mb so I'm not sure if the file size is the problem. If the size is the problem, how can I reduce the size?

What could be the reason behind the large file size? – Would it be the amount of paths or layers in my file? Or would it be resolution settings?

And what is the max size file that will function well in Character Animator?

 

My Mac is up to date (OS 10.15) and my Adobe apps are up to date (AI: 23.1.1 - CA: 2.1.1 - AE: 16.1.3)

 

Any help and suggestions will be greatly appreciated 🙂

 

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3 replies

alank99101739
alank99101739
Legend
October 25, 2019

Simple answer is "I don't know". Getting into guess work, yes resolution might make a difference. I am trying to understand why an AI file is so big though. Basically its size is likely to be causing extra processing to process it, so its slower. If the file is large, that probably means more work.

 

How to make it smaller.... that is hard to guess without access to the file. E.g. does it have large bitmaps in the AI file? If so, can you lower the res and shrink their size? Does the AI file have paths with lots of data points - can you simplify the paths to reduce the number of points in them? (E.g. using Adobe Draw on ipad, it gives me line segments with LOTS of data points. I can use AI features to reduce the number of points on the lines, make the file smaller.

 

But its hard to be definitive. There must be something about your AI files that is different to the CH sample puppet AI files for it to be bigger. And bigger things are frequently slower, more sluggish.

H
Harmonious_mind0101Author
Participant
October 25, 2019

I originally used GravitDesign to illustrate my character before switching to Adobe. So, rather than starting over, I imported my work from GravitDesign into AI ...There were some odd things about the convert. For example, a filled shape with an outline on GD converts to a fill shape with no outline PLUS an outline with no fill on AI - so talking about the data points, I suppose my file has virtually double as a result of the convert from GD. (So this can be one method of reducing the data points - lots of tedious work deleting all the outlines 😩)

 

I tried importing my character into After Effects and rigging it using Duik, which loaded and worked fine, so that may be a method ...however, I really like the look and simplicity of Character Animator. I'll try a few different things to reduce the size (it may even require starting fresh in Adobe - meaning the convert from GD would've been the issue) and hopefully get it sorted. I'll post back in the thread when I find a solution.

 

Cheers 🤙🤤🤙

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Harmonious_mind0101Author
Participant
October 26, 2019

UPDATE

I've tried a number of different methods to reduce the size of the file...

What didn't work was:

- Turning paths/ groups into symbols

- Deleting excess (I even deleted everything down to just the head with no facial features which didn't reduce it at all)

- Scaling down the character (even to 10% didn't work)

- Rasterize

- Scaling down the artboard

 

What finally worked was copying the layers, creating a new file and pasting the layers into it. I selected the Web Page canvas, but also found that any size canvas worked (even large custom canvases). Doing this brought my character file from 10.1mb to 537kb.

I've imported the file into Character Animator and found that it works, although takes around 35 seconds to rig a single body part.

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