Adobe Character Animator double character ?

[omarf26801895]

Hello everyone how you doing ? I have a question for my  project , I just started to learn Character Animator the day before and how to move the character but I wanted to put another character in my scene so 2 persons in one scene and control them by my face and voice so is that possible ? if yes can you briefly tell me how ? just briefly .

Thank You

[alank99101739]

Normally what you do is have two separate puppets, then you record the movements etc for one puppet in the scene, then you rewind the playhead and record the movements for the second puppet by selecting it instead. You can only “arm” one puppet for recording at a time however - so the webcam for the face would control one puppet the first time when you record, then you arm the second puppet and do a recording for it.

By “arming” the puppet I mean click on it so the red dot is on. That means when you start recording it will record data for that puppet. You also have to arm the behaviors you want to record - e.g. the “Face” behavior is where the webcam facial recognition feeds into controlling the puppet movements. If that is “armed” when you start recording, it will record the results of the facial recognition. You can do multiple passes at recording for a puppet, arming one or two behaviors per pass - e.g. I might do a first pass of the audio track and lip sync, maybe with head movements from the webcam. Then I will rewind and do a second recording of draggers to make the puppet body move. You can do as many passes and edits as required to get that puppet right.

Then rewind and do the same thing again for the next puppet And all the other puppets in the scene.

But you cannot arm two puppets at once from memory - just one at a time.

[KJerryK · Accepted solution]

So I tried a couple of ways to arm two characters at the same time and have them record simultaneously,

1. Put the two puppets in the same scene, and arm the behaviors you want to record for each puppet. Then arm both puppets by holding Ctrl (on Win 10) and clicking on each puppet in the timeline. This should turn both red lights on. Now both puppets will record camera and audio. It also works for compute lip sync from scene audio.

2. Another way is to have two puppets in the same file. I've only tried it for psd files, but am guessing it will also work for ai files. While this works, I would use it only when just simultaneous recordings are needed. To record each character separately requires a set of behaviors for each one.

[alank99101739]

Cool. So with that you can record two ouppets dancing or singing together in sync.

[KJerryK]

There are probably only certain projects where it is useful to record two or more puppets simultaneously doing the same thing. As you said, singing and dancing. I once did a herd of cattle, and also a marching band. Both of those might have been easier to do if I had recorded all the puppets at once, but that was before I knew it was possible.