Character Rigging and Illustrations

[Malek13]

Hello everyone! I am trying to rig a character with multiple profiles but have never done this before. From what I currently understand I would need to do is initially have my frontal profile character and copy the layer in Illustrator for example and rename it to the different profiles I need for my animation, correct? But now where I'm getting unsure: Do I need to alter or change every mouth, eyebrow, and eye position layer? Does character animator natively move the perspective of the mouth based on head position, will it still lip sync? I hope this makes sense lol, I'm just fairly new to this Adobe software and it makes me uneasy trying to plan a project out right now. Thank you in advance for any advice or info!

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

No - character animator is not 3D, so does not know how to adjust the mouth position for different angles. If you are doing head turns (multiple profiles), you have to repeat everything on the head (eyes, eyebrows, mouth etc) for each angle. So yes, its work. But it also gives you complete control over what the angles are and how they look.

I am not an artist - but one thing I have learnt is cartoons and 3D are not the same. You can do 3D modeling, but it is no longer a cartoon afterwards. A part of the “art” is getting a simpler 2D rendition to “look good”. (And this might be why I have not attempted profiles for any of my characters yet! I am not a good enough artist! 😉

But my understanding is you can just do profiles for just the head, or do profiles for the whole body. But each profile is pretty much like a separate puppet - you have to rig up each profile. So triggers have to be wired up for each profile, eyes for each profile, mouth for each profile, ...  So yes, a fair bit of effort.

[Malek13]

Thank you for this! It makes a lot of sense, and ya I'll just have to rig them separately but I know it'll be soooo worth it once I'm finished I will be doing a kinda 3D Character LOL!

[alank99101739]

Please share videos or final results here (if you can)! Its always fun to see the results of others work!

[Malek13]

I will most definitely do so! It's kind of a long project so it might not be for another few months LOL but I will post the end results here for sure! Thanks again for your guidance