Drop shadows not appearing now and opacity not transerre to puppet

[DarrenFMc]

Hi

Is there a reason why suddenly anything in Illustrator that either has a dropshadow or any opacity does not show correcty in Character Animator? For example, if something has a drop shadow applied in illustrator it no longer shows in The puppet. If something has opacity in illustrator, in Character Animator, the object shows as black no matter what th original color is?  It was working fine up to yesterday though..... I also noticed that paths in Illustrator that are not named but simply have a name of <Path> no longer turn u in character Animator. For example a layer with several paths now shows as a single layer in character animator with no sublayers. But if I now name those paths, they will appear in Character Animator?

[alank99101739]

Not all illustrator and photoshop features are supported in Character Animator. This might be one of them.

I thought there was some trick like using a smart layer which internally cached the result could be done, but not sure. It was discussed in the forums a long time back, but cannot remember the details sorry.

Unnamed layers (ones just saying <Path>) I think are just assumed to be not important in CH since you did not give them a name. Solution: give them a name! 

But if features used to work and now don't... ummm, no idea sorry! If you have a copy of the file others could try and have a look. One button that is sometimes useful is there is a "flush cache" button in the scene panel (two arrows in a circle) that I think you click holding ALT (or was it shift? just try them all!). Sometimes if CH gets confused this helps get it unconfused. No idea beyond that sorry!

If you had a document that used to work and suddenly stopped, that might be worth raising with Adobe either directly via support, or highlighting it here (some of the staff hang out in the community forums here too).

[DarrenFMc]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Yes, Character Animator does seem to get moody from time to time. The drop shadows and opacity layers did work until recently and then not. In Character Animator you can click on a layer item and change its opacity now but it was not an issue before. Sometimes clipping masks stop working and other glitches. The biggest drawback for me when troubleshooting is that any changes or actions applied in Character Animator do not transfer to the source file either Photoshop or illustrator. Applying a clipping mask in Character Animator does not show as a clipping mask in Illustrator when saved or exported as a puppet file. It would be usesful if the source files were updated also. I also found that editing cycle layer groups in Ilustrator can break then again in Character Animator, so you have to watch carefully when any minor changes are made.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Yep Alan is right. Basically the way Illustrator sets up files is a little weird and we can't reconcile everything (yet). https://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-character-animator/using/prepare-artwork.html has some more info on this:

• For Illustrator artwork, you can use a more accurate representation of it by selecting the Puppet in the Project panel. After that, deselect the Render As Vector option in the Properties panel. 
• Some layer settings and capabilities — opacity, gradients, blending mode, clipping paths, and so on — are not supported when the Render As Vector option is checked.

Typically I find unchecking Render as Vector gives me the best results, but I have to do suff like clipping masks inside CH. We don't do any re-writing of the original artwork as we want to keep things non destructive, but we all agree that we would love to support more AI features! Feel free to add/vote on it here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911317-character-animator

[DarrenFMc]

Cheers Dave, that worked. I must have hit that tick box somehow and did not notice it.