Controlling Puppet Movement with Keyboard

[MOTHdevil]

Hello! I'm monkeying around with Character Animator for the first time. I've created a basic puppet and presumably rigged it correctly, but I'm animating to a recorded audio track and need to control the puppet using a keyboard, rather than webcam... More like a "real" puppet than a motion-sensor driven one.

TLDR: I want to raise, lower, or pivot the eyebrows via keyboard, with them soft-returning to a neutral position after I release the keystroke. I'd like to be able to control the eyebrows the same way I can control the pupils, but the pupils seem to be the only keyboard movement baked into the rigging.

[alank99101739]

There are a fixed number of ways you can control a puppet - you just have to pick the most suitable.

- There is the face behavior controlled by webcam

- There are draggers you can control using a mouse

- There are keyboard shotcuts to trigger things (which can be combined with cycle layers for intermediate frames) (you can also control with a midi device)

- There is the transform behavior you can apply, similar to a dragger but you can set the values by number

- There are also replays where you can record an action and play it back later

It is not a trivial thing to swap between them. There is a bit of work to get rigging going. (Not terrible, but not trivial.)

You mention you dont want to use the web cam because you have an audio track? There is no problem recording a webcam face behavior with an existing audio track. You can splice the recording just like anything else.

If you want keyboard control, “triggers” are most likely what you want. “Cycle layers” has a few capabilities like holding on layers, reversing the sequence at end, etc. They may be what you are after. Otherwise you can record the new position then smooth out the start and end of a recording using “blends”. It is hard to recommend which to use without more info, so I am dropping a few keywords to look up in the user guide.

[MOTHdevil]

Thank you! I ended up deciding to record my face behavior during the audio track's playback.

Still - for "under the hood" knowledge, does anyone know why only the eye pupils have a specific baked-in behavior to be adjustable with the keyboard cursor, but no other rigged/tagged feature does that?

I was surprised to see that the pupil movement behavior wasn't transferable or assignable to any other similar object (such as the aforementioned eyebrows...)

[alank99101739]

I use the webcam to control eyes sometimes, but I normally like more detailed control so use the mouse (with snap turned off). I find the webcam can jitter a bit (maybe my lighting not good enough where ai record). In the face behavior you can turn on/off camera and mouse control. I did not even know you can use the keyboard to control the pupils!