Feature Focus: Puppet Maker

[Jeff Almasol]

Fun, fast, diverse character creation for everyone. No need to be an expert Photoshop or Illustrator user. And no need for rigging skills. Choose from a variety of character styles. Then with the simple interface start customizing the character by picking hair styles, skin tones, accessories, and much more, and seeing your character react to your movements and voice in real time. 

 

Creating a custom puppet using Puppet Maker

1. Open Character Animator (Beta). 
2. Click the Puppet Maker tile or Make a puppet button on the Home screen or choose File > Open Puppet Maker.  
3. In the Style section, select the puppet’s base style. 
   Move the mouse pointer horizontally across the style’s thumbnail (i.e., hover scrub) to view some of the possible looks that you can create.  
4. In the Customize section, choose different looks for the puppet, or click  Randomize to try a random combination of looks. 
5. In the Play section, preview how the puppet moves and changes appearance using its available controls. 
   These controls will also be available in the generated puppet. 
6. View and interact with the puppet at any time in the preview area. 
   Move your head and body in front of your webcam, talk into your microphone, and for puppets that support Dragger even drag in the Preview area with your mouse or finger on a touch display. Press trigger keys for available controls in the Play section. 
7. Click Generate. 

A puppet with the selected style and customizations is created and added to a new scene ready for you to control and record a performance – no need to rig the puppet at all! 

If you want a puppet with a different appearance, just open Puppet Maker again, make new selections, then generate a new puppet. 

Refreshing the preview area and controlling camera and microphone 

Along the bottom of the Puppet Maker window are controls for refreshing the preview in case you want to reset a character’s swaying hair or other parts controlled by physics, for calibrating the camera to a starting pose for face and body tracking, and for turning on or off the camera or microphone. 

Adding new styles (templates) to Puppet Maker

Puppet Maker comes with a small set of built-in styles or templates, but you can add new Puppet Maker templates to add to the available styles for new puppets. These Puppet Maker templates are .maker files on disk. They will be available from Adobe and third-party puppet sellers in the future. 

To add Puppet Maker templates, do any of the following:  

• Choose File > Import, then select one or more .maker files to add. 
• Double-click the .maker file in Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows). 
• In a Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows) window, navigate to your user Documents folder, then into the Adobe > Character Animator (Beta) > Puppet Maker subfolder, and then drag one or more .maker files into the Puppet Maker subfolder. 

Importing or double-clicking a single .maker file automatically installs the file into the Puppet Maker subfolder, opens Puppet Maker, and selects that .maker file’s style in the Style section. 

If you copy .maker files into the Puppet Maker subfolder on disk, the templates will appear in the Style section the next time you open Puppet Maker. 

Troubleshooting 

• If you have multiple camera sources and the character isn’t responding to your movements, the wrong camera might be selected. Close the Puppet Maker window, then select the preferred camera in the Camera & Microphone panel’s menu. We plan to provide the camera selection menu in the Puppet Maker window’s controls in a future Beta build. 
• If the character’s mouth doesn’t change as you talk into your microphone, check that you have the preferred default audio input. Close the Puppet Maker window, open the app preferences (Character (Beta) > Preferences on macOS, Edit > Preferences on Windows), then selected the preferred device for Default Input. 

Known issues and limitations 

Puppet Maker is still in development. 

In this first public Beta version (v22.0.0.7), please note the following: 

• Puppet preview updates are slow right now: Changing styles or customize options can take up to a few seconds to update the preview. We’re working to make selection changes more responsive in a future Beta build. 

What we want to know 

We want to hear about your experience with Puppet Maker:  

• What are your overall impressions?  
• Are you able to customize and create a puppet that meets your needs? 
• How do you think you might use Puppet Maker in your work? 

• How can we improve Puppet Maker?  

Also, we’d love to see what you create with Puppet Maker. Share your animations on social media with the #CharacterAnimator hashtag. 

Thank you! We’re looking forward to your feedback. 

(Use this Beta forum thread to discuss Puppet Maker and share your feedback with the Character Animator team and other Beta users. If you encounter a bug, let us know by posting a reply here or choosing Report a bug from the Provide feedback icon in the top-right corner of the app.) 

[CommonTime Productions]

Hello! This is a really cool new feature 🙂 Our 6-year-old granddaughter uses apps on her phone that have these kinds of character builders and I can see how incredibly useful this will be to make the adobe apps all-inclusive to the younger audience. Kudos to all that worked this out. Looking forward to getting to use it and we are planning to use a cartoon avatar for an upcoming music recording series based on the younger audience. We will post a short video showing some of the test puppets we are gonna play with. The feature of being able to create our own puppet art and upload all our choices to be ready for one of the puppet builds will be really helpful.  Great work Adobe!

[Smart Ears]

Played around with the puppet maker a little bit -- I really like it. However, would love to see a couple of things: a) children!!! I work with children and their parents, and its been a struggle getting 'kid' puppets. b) I tried the full body character style, but once I generated the puppet, I tried to scale the size of the puppet in character animator, and it scaled the whole scene. Is this what should happen? I wanted the puppet to be smaller relative to the background,  but for some reason the whole panel was being scaled. c) I was able to make several characters with different features -- as you said in the video - more styles will make it even more flexible. One feature that would be terrific is to be able to draw something and directly import it into puppetmaker - I would love to have this feature as it will make character animator accessible to younger children I work with - in addition to me of course. Thanks for such a wonderful dynamic team working on character animator!!!!!!

[Smart Ears]

In my post, when I said 'draw' and import, I meant draw on paper! 

[oksamurai]

Thanks for the feedback!

• a) Yes, we hope to have several more styles ready for launch, and some of those may be more youthful / kid focused.
• b) This is a great point. The background of these scenes are considered part of the puppet, but I can see how that would be confusing. For now, you could manually add a Transform behavior to the background to scale it differently. We'll think more about it - thanks!
• c) Great point as well. For now you can open up the PSD that gets created and manually import/add it there. But it's not too hard to imagine a future where characters have a "drop zone" you could drag custom artwork on, for like a shirt logo.

[elld20373292]

Hello Team.this is a huge step forward with the Puppet Maker. My suggestion is to focus on things that need more of customization importanc. Example: pants shorts are simple and don't need a lot of styles. SHirt logo designs( example Browse: to add own designs) and adding more face shapes are very important . IN any case thank you for this.

[Anez Bull]

Hello,

I want to congratulate you first, for the excellent work you are developing. This future update will help me to make an idea that I have in mind much easier, but I was wondering; referring to all the character style options that are going to be designed. How editable are they going to be? And I don't mean just the change in the shape of the nose or mouth. I'm talking about choosing a style and that same enlarge the face, putting expression lines, wrinkles, thicker lips, made the burder lines thicker or thinner. Maybe combine styles? ...  What I mean is if we could edit in Photoshop or Illustrator the avatar we chose based on the Character Animator file without affecting its functionality? ... Well ... I don't know... is too much? ... I just thought how much freedom is the plan? ...

Thank you for reading

[oksamurai]

Yes, so once you click that Generate button, you will get a normal CH puppet that includes the PSD file (Puppet Maker only works in Photoshop for now). So you can go back and make edits just like CH currently works and it should be fine (as long as you don't mess around with the basic structure too much).

[DNLD]

Hi,

Very cool feature! It would be great if it also worked with illustrator files. A vector based template instead of pixels/rasterized would fit very nicely in my current workflow:D

Kind regards,

Donald

[UltraEverything]

Super useful feature. I've been working on a PSD version for my own project that works in a similar way (selections are basically made within the PSD using actions, rather than in a fancy UI). But I definitely think it will create a lot more flexibility for high volume users, as well as a nice entry point for beginners. Great stuff!

[dschertz]

Loving this so far. Already using it for a quick character for a video this week. Feature request: Being able to go back into Puppet Maker to make changes to a character so we don't have to start from scratch.

[Boyzi]

How does the copyright works? Does it makes it our own character or does it stay the proprety of Adobe?

[CoSA_DaveS]

You are free to use the character in any production with no limits. But it won't be "your" character in that you can't prevent anyone else from using the same character in their production.

[Alexandre V.]

Hi ! I've just install the version 4.4 Character Animator Beta Version but I don't have the menu of to customize my pumpet does everyone has the same issue like me ? 🙂

Best regards,

Alexandre V.

[CoSA_DaveS]

You should be using Beta version is 22.0 (Build 11) or later. In your Creative Cloud desktop app, click on Updates on the left side, and then on the right side the three-dot menu > Check for updates.

[Brandon5C07]

First of all Excellent feature and i look forward to using it. I use Vyond online for some of my characters as they have an excellnt character building interface. If you could do a similar style as that it would be 100% the BEST software. 

To build a character It would be ideal if there was :-
1. Face Shapes
2. Hair styles

3. Eye Styles

4. Eyebrow Styles

5. Nose Styles
6. Mouth Styles

7. Clothing Top / Bottoms 
6. Shoes
8. Accessories (Glasses / hats / Etc)
9. Colour Changes for all the above

I know trhats a huge amount of work but it would make it the best option on the marker. As mentioned Vyonds interface is great and easy to use. I often do the characters there and then paste into photoshop to make the layers

[Imanbayyv Valerian]

All the wishes have already been written,so I'll just write that your work is highly respected. You are well done!

[Creatiion BlueEyes5FBA]

There are more styles we can add to this Puppet Maker. I being a Digital Artist can Contribute to this  program

[oksamurai]

Yes! See the section called "Can I Make My Own Puppet Maker Templates?" and you can sign up to be notified when we open this up.

https://pages.adobe.com/character/en/puppet-maker

[Dr. Vertna West]

I think this is great! I wish when we went back to the puppet maker after generating our puppet that it would return back to the same one we were working on...that way we could continue to customize it or make another one from that template instead of having to go into PS to edit it. Or it would be nice to be able to import the one we created back into Puppet Maker. But, this is still a great step forward - so thanks for this!!

[david50B9]

This is a great start.  Adobe's instincts are correct in that rigging is EXTREMELY difficult.  I haven't explored Puppet Maker fully yet because I need to rig fully custom artwork, so I won't offer feedback on it.  But please-  you need to work on the rigging system.  I'm a 20-year Flash veteran and the rigging in CA is KILLING me.  Especially the beta and the body tracking.  It is so unbelievably finicky that it's basically useless right now in my opinion.  I spend 95% of my time in CA just trying to rig my puppets correctly.  I've followed your videos watched them a dozen times, scoured the forums and I'm just stuck.  My character's feet are floating no matter what I do.  If you want CA to take off, you've got to get this rigging system reigned in.  It's rogue now.  It's a black box.  I don't think your experts even have a handle on it yet.  First you tell us to make this or that NOT independent.  Then you tell us that it has to be independent.  My head is swimming and this is very frustrating.  

[oksamurai]

Yes, rigging is still difficult and we do hope to make this better in the future. Puppet Maker is one way to leapfrog that process, but I agree that as you start to make more advanced characters, particularly those with full Limb IK, things can get very complex very fast.

If it's possible to share one of your non-feet pinning puppets here or DM me, we could take a closer look. It would be helpful to see where people are getting tripped up in the process.

[Willie Bryan Rogers]

Hello @oksamurai i am interested in Puppet Maker so i can make my own characters so i can make animated series for my YouTube and Tv Channel on Roku and Amazon

[Willie Bryan Rogers]

Hi this is Willie Bryan Rogers i did chat with you on Twitter once i am exicited about the new puppet maker because i do want to make my own characters then make my own animated television show for my Tv channel on Roku

[Caliena]

This is great! This will be a VERY powerful tool when it is flushed out and there are more options. This will keep me subscribed to Creative Cloud for sure!