Can I add an animated background? I want to have animals walking around in the background

[erics2020]

I'm super new to Character Animator. I'm getting the hang of the rig controls, but I'm having an issue adding an animated background (not moving for a walk cycle, but animated). Is it even possible to add an animated background? If so, how would I do that? I want to have animals walking around behind my character.

Thanks in advance.

[Platty Puss]

Hi Eric,

The approach I would take to adding a video background is to use Adobe Premier as the final step. By default, Character Animator leaves the background transparent. It is not obvious because CH give you a white backroung when in reality is is transparent. Bring you CH video into PR and add you other video. I use this method all the time. I hope this helps.

Be well fellow puppeteer - Platty

[erics2020]

Perfect. Thank you!

[mariusw30260965 · Accepted solution]

Hi Eric,

what kind of animated background are you planning? There are at least 3 different approaches.

First, like Platty has pointed out, a default scene is plain transparent. So, any Background you want to have has to be a puppet by itself. Or multiple puppets.

Example 1: Create a Background puppet with the ground and the horizon and the sky. Then create some Animal Puppets. If they have a walk behaviour you can let them walk around. the next step is to create some foreground elements, bushes, trees and put them in front of background and animals. Now your background can be quite lively. Avoid puppeteering the animals with the arrow keys. Use the walk behavior when displacing the puppet along the x axis and record via key framing. look it up, it is a different control than transform, it is hidden in the walk behavior (The reason for this: i may have found some bugs: The recorded actions are not reproducable. Depending on the scale of the stage the positioning is messing up big time. This may be because i try to use 4k-settings. But working on a 4k scale is damn buggy. and you do not have keyframe control when recording movements)

Example 2: When creating the background, you do not necessarily need to make seperate puppets. If it is a simple transform movement, add a crown to the animal layer in your background file. Make a puppet of your background. Add an additional transform behavior to your animal layer. Now you can record keyframes to the transform behavior in your background puppet. Look for the stop watch icon in the additional transform behaviour. Activate it to gain access to the key frames timeline.

Example 3: insert your animals as cycle layer. Create a loop for your animal. add all loop stages as seperate layers to your puppet source file. Make all loop layers invisible. Add cycle layer behavior to your puppet and have your frames loop. now you may have a dog wiggling its tail endlessly. or an elephant on a trampoline.

Note that your puppets ignore transparency settings from photoshop and illustrator. But you can add leyer transparency in Character Animator on a whole puppet level (for translucent ghost characters for example)

Note that illustrator puppets mess up big time when using clipping masks. they may act like pins and distort your character.

Takeaway: you can do everything within Character animator. Working with premiere or after effects is feasible when adding real world footage to the scene.

[erics2020]

Wow, I totally missed this response. Thanks a lot! This answered my question and a few I didn't have yet.