Adding/Removing Cycles to Auto Blink; other Blink questions

[paulb27964210]

Hi!

I'm relatively new to character animator, and I'm trying to accomplish some very specific things:

1) Am I able to pick and choose what sets of cycles auto blink will control and my face will control? I'd like to have motion capture effect the eyebrow movement and mouth shapes while having the blinking occur on an auto cycle, but I can't disable one without effecting the other (when I undefine the right and left blinks in an attempt to remove the feature from the camera, it also takes it away from the auto blink function)

2) Can I assign the auto blink to particular eye shapes so that it's only active during the moments that a particular group in a swap set is active? He'll blink (with auto blink on) while an eyeshape that doesn't call for that to happen in active in a swap set. The character that I'm working with doesn't have eyes that have a typical eyeball/pupil dynamic, so it would be nice to have the blink disabled while particular eye shapes are active.

Thanks in advance!

-Paul

[alank99101739]

(1) I am not sure I understand the question exactly, but autoblink will look for the Blink layers Under where you add the behavior. So to make autoblink affect one set of eyes and not another, organize the puppet hierarchy so the autoblink behavior can be added above the eyes to be affected and not the other eyes.

Similarly, puppets get the eye gaze, face, etc behaviors added by default to the root. You can delete that behavior from the root and add it to any sublayer above what you want that behavior to control. This gives you scoping control.

But it is a little funky at the same time - what if both sets of eye blinks occur at same time? I guess one just wins over the other. But the key point is the position the behavior is added in the puppet hierarchy affects the scope of control of that behavior.

(2) Yes. You can add the autoblink inside a swap set triggered layer, so autoblink only kicks in for that swap set. You just use the scoping of the puppet hierarchy to control the scope.

It can still be a bit funky to get right - e.g. you might need to add Eye Gaze (I assume that does blinks too - cannot remember) OR auto-blink to each swap set member (and remove the eye gaze behavior from the puppet root) - otherwise the two behaviors will fight for control.

You can expand the handles to see what has got control of what behaviors, in the puppet properties panel. Look for “Handles”, “Views” etc. Expand those parts out and it will eventually show you which layers that behavior is controlling.

[paulb27964210]

Ok, I think I understand. You can remove the "eye gaze" (or any other) handle from the root puppet and add it to the individual drawing layers to get more precise with what that behavior targets?

I appreciate the fast response too! I'm pretty terrible when it comes to problem solving with things like this, so the help is greatly appreciated

[alank99101739]

Yes, that is exactly right. You can add behaviors to nested layers to reduce their scope.

Sometimes it is needed eg with profiles as some behaviors will pick the first tagged layer (not all layers) so you need to repeat the behavior per profile. Other times you need to nest them because Head Turner and Walk share the same profile tags, so nesting can be important there to make sure right behavior gets the right tags.

Background images are puppets but don’t have eyes. Some people remove most of the behaviors (except Transform) to be “clean”. (I don’t bother! Lol!)

[paulb27964210]

This was insanely helpful and informative, and I'm brand spanking new to this so I really appreciate your clarifying your initial explanation.

Thanks!