Character Animator (Beta 6) – Detailed Changes

[Jeff Almasol]

New and changed features

General

• Added six new languages for the application's user interface: Spanish, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.
• The user interface has a workspaces bar with four default task-based workspaces: Start, Rig, Record, and Stream.

Projects and the Project panel

• Upon launching the application, create a new project instead of opening the most recently used project by holding down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) key. This can be useful if the recent project can take a while to open but you know you want to work on a different project instead.
• Items in the Project panel now sort by Type by default, to match Preview 4 and earlier. Also, the sort direction is now retained between sessions.
• Duplicating of folders is no longer supported.

Artwork and Audio files

• Adding an audio file or scene to the current scene now extends the current scene’s duration, if needed, to match the duration of the added item.
• Imported audio files selected in the Project panel can again be previewed via the Play button in the Properties panel.
• Importing puppets and projects is faster.
• Replacing the source artwork file for a puppet item in the Project panel will rename the puppet based on the replacement artwork’s file name if the puppet wasn’t previously renamed.

Puppets and the Puppet panel

• Duplicating a puppet item in the Project panel now makes a separate copy of all groups and layers in the puppet, not just the top-level puppet. This allows you to keep changes in one puppet (e.g., deleting a group) from affecting the duplicated puppet. The source artwork files are not duplicated, so changes to a layer’s appearance in the artwork file will still affect all puppets that reference the layer.
  Note: Duplicating a shared puppet item (i.e., it was previously created via the Make “group-name” Shareable context menu command) will not make separate copies of its groups and layers.
• Layers and groups in the Puppet panel can now be duplicated (Edit > Duplicate menu command), so that you can modify the duplicate without affecting the original. When a group is duplicated, its entire structure (layers and groups within it) is as well. If, instead, you want to keep the structure of both groups the same — for example, deleting a layer in one also deletes it in the other — make it shareable (via the Make “group-name” Shareable context menu command).
• Layers and groups now have Blending Mode and Opacity settings in the Properties panel.
• Tags are more important than names for handles, so the Puppet panel now displays a handle’s tags to its right and in a similar look as text-based tags in the Properties panel. The name for a handle now appears centered below the handle, but explicitly created guides named exactly as their tag (e.g., “Dangle”) will no longer have a name by default in the Puppet panel. Similarly, the Handle, Pin, Dragger, Dangle, and Stick tools will now create handles without names by default. You can always add a name for identification purposes, but the intent is to remove clutter in the panel.
• The bounding box for a selected layer now appears as a simple blue outline, with applied layer tags identified along the bottom edge of the bounding box.
• When a group is selected in the Puppet panel, the Attach To popup in the Properties panel will list unnamed handles by the tags that are applied to them (e.g., “<Jaw>”). Handles with no names and tags won’t appear in this popup.
• Removed the Puppet > New Puppet in Photoshop and New Puppet in Illustrator menu commands. Use the Chloe links in the Start workspace instead.
• Renamed the Puppet > Group As Puppet menu command to Group Layers, and no longer made the created puppet shared by default. Also, removed the Puppet > Ungroup Puppet menu command as it could be problematic in certain situations.
• Duplicated groups (shared or not) and layers now use unique names; previously, only shared groups did.
• Renamed the Puppet > Staple Puppet to Parent menu command to either Staple “group-name” to “containing-group-name” or Staple n Groups, depending on the number of independent groups selected. Also, added the first command to the context menu for an independent group.
• Moved the puppet icon for shared groups to the right side of the group name, to streamline the hierarchy of group and layer names.
• Added the Export Puppet command to the context menu for a puppet in the Project panel.

Behaviors

• The Camera Input and Microphone Input buttons in the Camera & Microphone panel, when disabled, now override (disarm) the Arm for Record setting for the Eye Gaze, Face, Lip Sync, and Nutcracker Jaw behaviors. This allows you to view, while stopped, the results for a selected puppet with recorded takes for these behaviors without needing to deselect the puppet first. For example, when editing visemes, you can easily see how a change to a viseme appears on a character without having to deselect the puppet track item or play back the result.
• Breathe: The handle tag name has changed from Chest to Breathe.
• Cycle Layers: Added a Continue After Pause parameter to control how to resume a cycle from a paused layer.
• Dangle: Various improvements:
  • Dangled artwork should crumple much less often.
  • Performance of several dangled puppets (for example, hair in a multi-view puppet) should be much better/faster.
  • The Hinge attach style can now be used to allow the dangled puppet to pivot freely around its attachment point.
  • Increased the maximum Spring Stiffness to 200%.
• Lip Sync: Various improvements:
  • New viseme editor in the Timeline panel, for quickly viewing and editing visemes.
  • Significantly improved the speed of the Compute Lip Sync from Scene Audio operation.
  • The Lip Sync behavior applied to existing projects and .puppet files has been renamed as “Lip Sync (old)” to retain compatibility. An updated Lip Sync behavior is available that has support for future improvements.
• Nutcracker Jaw: Various improvements:
  • Added audio control of the jaw.
  • Added a Movement parameter to control the type of jaw movement (rotational clockwise or counterclockwise, or vertical).
• Transform: Added a Group Opacity parameter so that Opacity adjustments affect the entire puppet as a single group versus affecting layers individually.
• Walk: A new behavior for automatically generated and customizable walk cycles of profile-pointing characters.

Recording, Playback, and the Timeline panel

• Reorder tracks in the Timeline panel by dragging their track headers vertically. Also, add project items to a scene at a specific depth by dragging them from the Project panel into the Timeline panel’s track header area.
• Trim the in or out points for the selected track items and take bars to the playhead via the Option/Alt+[ (trim the in point) and Option/Alt+] (trim the out point) keyboard shortcuts.
• Jump to the previous or next in or out point (for a track item or take bar) or a marker via the Option/Alt+Left Arrow or Option/Alt+Right Arrow keyboard shortcuts.
• Dragging the playhead, a track item, take bar, marker, or a marquee selection horizontally in the Timeline panel now automatically scrolls through time.
• Dragging project items into or dragging tracks within the Timeline panel now vertically auto-scrolls the contents of the panel as needed.
• Zoom in on or out from a specific point in time using the mouse scroll wheel by placing the pointer over the Timeline panel and holding Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) as you move the scroll wheel vertically.
• Scroll in time using the mouse scroll wheel either by holding down Shift key as you move the scroll wheel vertically or by holding down Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) as you move the scroll wheel horizontally.
• When zoomed into the duration of a frame of time in the Timeline panel, the horizontal center of the frame is now denoted with a dashed line to indicate the exact time that the track item or take is being sampled.
• Clicking one of several selected items (track headers, track items, take bars, projection bars, markers) now selects only the clicked item, deselecting others.
• Removed the unnecessary Timeline > Split Lip Sync into Visemes menu command.

Live Output

• Added Mercury Transmit support for cross-platform broadcasting of a scene to external devices (e.g., a second display or third-party hardware) or another application that can composite it with other visuals for streaming to different web sites.

Performance

• Improved performance in several places throughout the application.

Miscellaneous

• Added a Close Others command to the Scene and Puppet panel tab menus (opened when you click the blue text on the tab) to close all but the current scene or puppet in the panel.
• Renamed the menu submenu for opening recent projects as File > Open Recent Projects.
• Renamed the menu command for exporting to Adobe Media Encoder as File > Export > Video via Adobe Media Encoder.
• Added a Provide Feedback command to the Help menu and Welcome panel for submitting feature requests on the Ideas for Character Animator page on Aha.com.
• Improved mouse wheel and trackpad responsiveness.
• Improved OpenGL rendering in the Scene panel.

Fixed issues

Projects

• Resetting a layer that was previously grouped as a puppet no longer causes a hang and a corrupt project.
• Duplicating non-puppet items (scenes, audio, artwork) in the Project panel no longer fails with an “Internal error code: (1564513505:525+17) expected model.Puppet” error message.
• Hiding and showing the Scene panel while content is still animating no longer causes a hang.
• The frame rate displayed in the Scene panel while stopped or recording is now more accurate.
• Trying to reopen the current project no longer attempts to do so.

Artwork and Assets

• Cancelling a relink or replace operation for a puppet’s source file no longer causes a crash.
• Importing an artwork file with a layer named “...” no longer causes an “Internal error code: (1033274218:408+51) libgit2 error -1 (14/Failed to insert entry. Invalid name for a tree entry - .) returned from git_treebuilder_insert(NULL, treebuilderP.get(), (char*)node_nameZ, &oid, mode)” error.
• Importing an artwork file containing a single layer that has no name no longer causes an assert.
• Opening an existing (Beta 5) project should no longer fail to render some artwork. This problem occurred most notably in the Getting Started project.
• Importing a file now scrolls the Project panel to view the added item.
• Files that cannot be imported successfully no longer leaves the project in a incomplete state.

Puppets and the Puppet panel

• Incorporating external edits to artwork when a project is being opened no longer causes an “Attempt to index a nil value” error message.
• Several “attempt to index a nil value” error scenarios when replacing or deleting puppets should no longer occur.
• A puppet layer rotated in a Preview 4 project is now rotated as expected when opened in a newer version.
• Improved the responsiveness of adjusting transformations (position, scale, rotation) for selected layers in the Puppet panel.
• Grouped layers are now grouped by layer top-to-bottom order, rather than selection order.
• Untagging a handle when Show Mesh is enabled in the Puppet panel no longer shows a “Puppet.lua:1157: attempt to index local ‘binding’ (a nil value)” error.
• Replacing the source artwork for a duplicated puppet in the Project panel no longer causes the duplicate puppet’s artwork to also change.
• Revealing the location for a selected item (by clicking the blue link in the Properties panel) should now work more reliably in non-English versions.
• Grouping layers separately at different levels of the puppet hierarchy now uses expected group names, unaffected by each other.
• Resetting a group whose attachment point no longer exists no longer causes a “privateGatherHandleTreeArray: expects warp-with-parent layers to attach to handle” error message.
• Puppet files that have previously reset layers no longer cause an “expects warp-with-parent layers to attach to handle” error when added to a scene.
• Adding layers from a shared artwork file into a puppet (i.e., a “mashup” puppet) no longer causes an “Error: loadPuppet: expects non-writable handles as leaves, but found one with children.” message.
• Renaming a layer in the Puppet panel that is currently scrolled out of view no longer shows an error message.
• Importing a .puppet file while a recording was in progress no longer creates an incorrectly named puppet in the Project panel.
• Importing a .puppet file created in a newer version of Character Animator should no longer reference a project named TmpExtract.tmp in the error message. Importing into Beta 5 will still show this confusing error message, but future versions imported into Beta 6 will be clearer.
• Reopening the Puppet panel when it previously had a selected group now properly displays handle names and tags.
• Dragging layers from the Puppet panel into the Project panel no longer shows a mouse cursor that implies it’ll work.
• Selecting different layers or different handles no longer resets the vertical scroll position of the Properties panel to the top.
• Changing the size of a layer (e.g., by adding or deleting pixels from the artwork) or group (by adding/deleting layers) when a group’s origin has been moved should no longer cause the layer to shift.
• The meshes displayed between the Puppet and Scene panels should now be more consistent.
• Making a grouped layer independent no longer shows a “privateGatherHandleTreeArray: expects warp-with-parent layers to attach to handle” error.
• Importing a puppet or project while the Scene panel had auto-animating content, such as emitting particles, no longer causes “Invalid surface image” (Mac) or “Invalid image file” (Win) errors.
• Deleting a puppet during a recording no longer causes a crash.
• Exporting a puppet during a recording now properly finishes the recording first.
• Exporting a puppet no longer causes a “Could not delete the directory” error.
• Staple tool no longer works when more than one group is selected.

Behaviors

• Adding a behavior when focus was previously in a different panel like the Puppet panel no longer causes an “illegal attempt to read key getPPath” error message.
• Undoing or resetting a checkbox parameter (e.g., Hold on Last Layer in Cycle Layers or Group Opacity in Transform) now updates the Scene panel immediately, instead of requiring a manual refresh.
• Auto Blink: Changes to Blinks per Minute now take effect immediately instead of waiting until the next blink.
• Dangle, Walk: Scaling a puppet that has Dangle handles to 0% vertically or horizontally no longer causes “could not invert matrix” or “handle value is not a number!” errors.
• Eye Gaze: Pupils no longer move outside the eyeball for Illustrator-based puppets when Render as Vector is enabled.
• Eye Gaze: Mouse input now works on one eye even if the other eye doesn’t exist.

Recording, Playback, and the Timeline panel

• The Split Lip Sync into Visemes command no longer fails with an “Internal error code: (1564513505:504+15) expected model.Folder” error message.
• Toggle-deselecting an audio track item (via Cmd/Ctrl-click) now properly deselects the track header as well.
• Holding down the Cmd/Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow key now updates the scene while holding down the keys instead of just after releasing them.
• Scene panel should no longer go blank and playback no longer work unexpectedly.
• Resetting a behavior parameter value during recording now uses the new (default) value for the remainder of the recording.
• Fixed some cases of “Incorrect time graph formulation” errors.
• Lip Sync takes are no longer created when the microphone is off.
• Particles now works even if the take is trimmed earlier in time.

Export

• Exporting puppet files no longer contain unnecessary files, thereby reducing their file sizes.
• When exporting a puppet, the file dialog box now remembers the last location used, instead of always starting in the project folder.

Dynamic Link

• Moving a scene dynamically linked to other applications into a different folder in the Project panel no longer causes the scene to stop rendering.
• Choosing Edit Original for a Character Animator scene dynamically linked in Premiere Pro no longer launches After Effects, as of the Premiere Pro 2017.0.2 Release.
• Toggling the audio in a scene now immediately updates the scene in After Effects or sequence in Premiere Pro.

Live Output

• (Mac) When outputting to Syphon clients from non-Retina displays, scene output should no longer be too soft and require adjusting the Scene panel width or height by one pixel.
• (Mac) Syphon output no longer goes blank when switching workspaces.

Miscellaneous

• The application now runs in the expected App Language set in the Creative Cloud application preferences when Character Animator was last installed, including when upgrading from Beta 5 to Beta 6.
• (Windows only) When another application is using the webcam at the time Character Animator launches, quitting no longer causes Character Animator to hang.
• Launching the application or opening the Scene panel on machines with lower-end graphics cards no longer shows endless OpenGL error messages.
• (Mac only) Importing a file by dragging it from a Finder window that’s currently behind the Character Animator application window, across the Scene panel, and onto the application icon no longer causes a
• Items in the Project panel are now properly sorted.
• Changing the zoom value in the Scene panel to 0 no longer shows a “Matrix cannot be inverted” error message.
• Choosing a menu command while renaming a project item no longer shows a “someone asked for a recentOid but the object was never written” error message.
• Attempting to open the Show Trigger Keys window or export a puppet now works when a take is selected, and for export a puppet when a puppet track item is selected.
• The number format used in the Zoom Scene and Zoom Puppet controls should now be appropriate for the current language/region (for example, using comma instead of period or having a space before the percent sign).
• The Show Mesh button in the Puppet and Scene panels will now stay enabled even if you close and reopen the panel or switch between workspaces.
• On non-English systems, the source file path for a selected puppet or audio item now references the translated names for common folders like Documents (e.g., Documenti in Italian).
• When the current audio device is not working (e.g., not connected), a warning dialog box is now displayed instead of failing to record a take.
• Resizing panels using a tablet stylus now works more reliably.
• Pressing the Left/Right Arrow keys while the History panel has focus no longer moves through history. This avoids a conflict if using those keys for the Walk behavior.
• Dragging panels between displays (e.g., from a Retina display to an external non-Retina one) now updates panel contents immediately.
• The Character Animator window should now move to front when choosing Edit Original for a dynamically linked scene in After Effects.
• (Mac only) The Hide Appliction, Hide Others, and Quick Character Animator menu commands in the application menu are now translated when the application is running in non-English. Also, Hide Application is now called Hide Character Animator.
• Miscellaneous performance improvements and bug fixes.

Known issues

• If a scene doesn’t render (i.e., Scene panel shows only the current background color), try clicking the Refresh button at the bottom of the Scene panel. If that still doesn’t work, try Option-clicking (Mac) / Alt-clicking (Windows) the Refresh button. If the scene still does not render correctly, please file a bug report and attach a project or artwork file.
• In an Illustrator file, layers and groups with “Guide” in their name will not be interpreted as guides/handles, and their content still render even if muted in the artwork file. Only paths are supported at this time.
• Background syncing or backup programs (e.g., Dropbox) might cause error messages in Character Animator if the current project’s files are being synced or backed up at the same time. Avoid creating projects in these background-synced locations, or at least avoid working in a project while syncing is enabled.
  Workaround: Exclude the folder containing your Character Animator projects (by default, located in your user Documents/Adobe/Character Animator/Beta (Mac) or Documents\Adobe\Character Animator\Beta (Win) folder) and its subfolders from virus scanning, or at least for write operations.
• Applying the Draggable handle tag to the top-level origin handle for a puppet won’t allow the puppet to be dragged in the scene.
  Workaround: If the puppet’s layers are enclosed in a single top-level group, apply the Draggable tag to that group’s origin.