A few quick questions

Report · Jan 30, 2018

A few quick questions (these are not big issues, and I'm only seeking quick answers, thanks)...

1. Pinning stuff together

Is there any way to pin two dangling parts together? I'd simply like my character wear a skirt that blows in the wind, but the front and rear parts of the skirt don't stay together at the edges.

2. Eyelids

In the face tagger, I notice there are tags for "top eyelid" and "bottom eyelid". What are these used for? I've seen loads of videos about blinking and eyebrows, but nothing about eyelids.

3. Eye wideness

When you make a new puppet, by default it copies how wide your eyes are, but as soon as you add a blink layer, this feature is lost. That's a shame as it allows loads of facial expression. Is there any way to have a blink layer AND get it to copy your eye wideness?

4. More rigid body
In Character Animator, when I move my character's head, it causes the body to sway all over the place, while the neck remains fairly stiff. Is there any way to change this, so that the shoulders remain more still, while most of the head movement comes from the neck (like how real people move)?

5. Workflow
All the puppets in my animation use exactly the same head (with different bodies), so I figured it made sense to create them all in one big Photoshop file. But, when it comes to taking these puppets into Character Animator, I'm guessing we're expected to save each puppet out into separate files first? Is that correct?

6. Vector artwork
I've made all my puppets in Photoshop, but it's all pure vector shapes - nothing is rasterized. But Character Animator seems to convert everything to raster images, meaning I have to make everything really high res or it gets pixellated. Is there any fix to this problem, so that Character Animator will keep everything as vectors?

7. What's the Handle tool for? [Edit: Just discovered it's used for behaviors like walking]

8. Can I dangle something from two fixed points? [Edit: Just discovered you can do this with pinning. I had thought that all pinning was absolute, as with feet. But it seems you can pin independent parts to their parent.]

Sorry about all the questions but I only want quick answers, thanks.

Report · Feb 01, 2018

Answers in case it helps.

1. Pinning stuff together: I have not seen that. Yes, it would be nice to have!

2. Eyelids: I think they are used to do blinks, I suspect could also effect if you use the camera to control how opened/closed eyes are, but not sure.

3. Eye wideness: No eye-dea. (Sorry, could not help it!)

4. More rigid body: You can try putting bones at places in the body to control this somewhat. Sometimes I put pins on the shoulders so the neck bends but the rest of the body does not. I found useful to experiment with putting pins right on the edge vs in a bit from the edge - makes a different to how the image stretches. E.g. top of shoulder I tend to pin right at the edge, but under the arm I pin in a bit from the edge.

5. Workflow: I put different puppets in different files. Ch can get confused with different things in one file, even when hidden. It does bounding box calculations at times for example, to work out how big something is before distorting it, or working out the center.

6. Vector artwork: I went with Illustrator for this reason (not photoshop) - so it can scale better. I think hires photos is your only other choice. Note, I still render as bitmaps (there is an option to render as bitmaps or vectors) because some gradients don't work when rendering as vectors.

Report · Feb 03, 2018

Thanks Alank! That was indeed helpful.

Report · Feb 03, 2018

I just reread your original request, and your point 8 was “you can pin things to the parent”. For you question of pinning things together, have you thought about having nested independent groups then using pins to connect the nested group to the parent group? You can add different behaviors (e.g. different gravity or wind settings) to try and make them dangle a bit different Etc.

The other idea if they are not overlapping (two separate things dangling) I am guessing you could do a transparent rectangle to connect the two dangles. So it looks separate, but they are connected with transparent objects.