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N
namor
Participating Frequently
October 11, 2018
Question

Issues between Illustrator and Character

  • October 11, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 374 views

Hello!

When Im working in Illustrator and Character simultaneously, Ill make a change in illustrator, and then Character will usually incorporate the change. However, layers within Character will shift or move, or resize. The change is minor but its a drag on workflow forcing me to adjust each affected layer. When will this be resolved? Or is there something I can do on my end?

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    1 reply

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    October 11, 2018

    I may not be understanding your point exactly, but the layer hierarchy in Illustrator is very important for Character Animator to be able to control the puppet. You really need to get this tree structure right, then only make changes to the artwork without changing the hierarchy. Every time you change the tree you potentially lose rigging information (which I think is your complaint). The only solution to that is to not change the layer hierarchy.

    I doubt Character Animator will ever improve here as it does not see what you did to the artwork file (it does not see that you moved layer X to under layer Y) - it just sees the final result. I don't think it can reliably work out the changes you made once you get beyond simple changes. (Maybe there is some clever way, but I can see this would be tricky to get right.)

    I just try to follow the same puppet hierarchy for all puppets. Note that deeply nested layer structures do not matter - it is mainly the top level layers (head, body, arms, legs, hands, etc).

    N
    namorAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 13, 2018

    Hello!

    Thanks for the reply, I meant to say the artwork in the layer has resized, or moved. For example, I have 5 heads: front, right quarter, left quarter, right profile, and left profile. The left profile, for an inexplicable reason is 5-10% smaller in size than the others. Checked illustrator, and they are the same size. I go to character animator puppet rig and they are the same size. Finally, go to record, head turn results in a smaller left profile. jfhsdjhdfsafjsda

    Another example, I have a desk in the scene. The position of the desk in animator and character are different and are different sizes. Why??!??!

    My arms have been resized in Character animator too. I have them at the desired length, shape, etc in Illustrator but a complete mess in animator. Do i need to start from scratch and create a new character animator project? What about all the triggers, and swap sets.

    ADOBE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    October 15, 2018

    I was going to say that I had never seen that one before... then an hour ago I had the body (but not arms or feet) shrink in CH but not in the artwork file. It shrank by about 5%! I have no explanation.

    feel free to export the puppets and I can try on my machine if any help.


    I think I worked out the problem in my case. What seems to be happening is when I add more to the artwork, the origin can move. But it does not seem to affect independent layers So what happened was CH moved some things around and not others resulting in independent arms being disconnected from the body - I had to drag them back into place in CH even though the artwork had them placed correctly relative to each other.

    It still feels a little strange (like it got scaled as well) but it may be things just got moved outwards from the origin rather than scaled. The body parts were all the right size - just transposed, as if their position was recorded relative to the root puppet layer - so when the root puppet layer got bigger in the original artwork, the arms and head etc all flew out further from the body (making it look like the body shrunk).

    Feels like a bug to me, but v2 is out today so I will give that a try first.

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