Hi everyone! Character animator is an amazing tool.
I tested it a bit, and have written down some suggestions that could help improving it even further.
Here are the suggestions:
- Allow user to break the Head Position Strength from the camera Input into Horizontal and Vertical Strength
This would let the user fully customize and improve advanced headturns (made through stacking multiple Face Behaviors).
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- Add Head Position Strength to the Layer Picker
With that, the user could customize detailed Head Turns, or animate headphones/glasses to his character for example.
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- Automaticaly release the Trigger from a Child Group of layers before releasing The trigger from a Parent Group.
For example, the user has a group of layers nested inside each other, like:
. Idle_LayerCycle
. Jumping_LayerCycle
. Sitting_LayerCycle -> Sitting_And_Waving_Goodbye
If the user wants to go from "Sitting_And_Waving_Goodbye" to "Jumping_LayerCycle",
he has to turn off the "Sitting_And_Waving_Goodbye"trigger,
then turn off "Sitting_LayerCycle",
to finally activate the "Jumping_LayerCycle" trigger.
Maybe we could have a less painful way to cycle through Nested groups.
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- Add "Carroussel" shortcuts to Swap Sets.
Let's say the User wants to mix different animations for eyes, mouths, noses, etc...
36 shortcuts wouldn't be enough to a task like this. And not everyone has access to a MIDI controller....
What about adding shortcuts to cycle through the replays/triggers/items from a Swap Set?
It would work like the "Layer Picker", but on Steroids!
The user could customize the "Carroussel" shortcuts, like:
. [A] for previous Replay or Layer.
. [D] for Next Replay.
. [S] to Activate the selected Replay / Or have the option to Auto Trigger the current Replay.
The Controls Panel would let the user preview the Current Replay/Layer highlited by the "Carroussel" Swap Set, before he hits [S] in this example.
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- Other suggestions to Revamp the Triggers Panel
On a big project, is kinda hard to look through every group of layers in order to fix or change the Triggers and Swap Sets.
And sometimes we have to work with duplicated triggers to do something like running a Replay and a Layer Cycle at the same time.
What if we have a robust Triggers Panel, based on Adobe's "Keyboard Shortcut" window. So the user could search and attach
his triggers to the keyboard, without worring too much about the Layers Hierarchy.
It could even be color coded, like this mockup here:
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These are the suggestions i have,
The Character Animator Team did an amazing job by putting this tool together!
I hope some of these suggestions can help them improving this tool.
Thanks in advance
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