MIDI Board Basic Setup

[ech6a]

This Christmas, I received a MIDI board and an Elgato Streamdeck to further fine tune my performances and puppets.  I am a self-taught designer and editor, and have done a lot of reading up on MIDI devices before this purchase, but considering I'd never heard of "MIDI" until last month I knew there would probably be a learning curve involved

The MIDI device I have is the Korg NanoKontrol2, which has a good number of sliders and dials.  I have already installed the drivers and the KorgKontrol Editor, but I have no idea how to set it up so that Adobe Character Animator recognizes the MIDI board so that I can map certain triggers to the buttons and dials.  Despite pouring over all of the MIDI posts on this forum and all of the related Korg information and I am at a TOTAL loss!

If someone would just help push me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.  To begin, do I need to install a different type of DAW software, or is the included Korg Kontrol Editor (screenshots included below) all I need to connect to Character Animator and assign my triggers?

Thank you all so much!

https://www.korg.com/us/products/computergear/nanokontrol2/

[KJerryK]

This site https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/09/28/midi-and-adobe-character-animator/ may help you get started.

[ech6a]

Thank you KJerryK​, that does help a bit!  It's one of the sites that I have open and have read before(I know that alank99101739​ has helped out A LOT on this forum and has done some really interesting experiments with MIDI).  Unfortunately, I still don't understand how to get Character Animator to recognize my MIDI device/how to link my MIDI device to Character Animator.

I wish there was a "for dummes" section on how to do this .  Everything I read seems to insinuate that the user knows a lot about MIDI, and that simply plugging the board into your computer means that you can go right into Character Animator and start assigning triggers to buttons and dials.  That is not happening for me, so there needs to be another step I need to take in order to make this work.  So then I try and figure out - do I need an additional "DAW" software to work with here?  Is the Korg Kontrol Editor I screenshotted above a "DAW" software? 

As you can tell I am totally bamboozled.  I try very hard to research and learn how to do things on my own, but obviously I'm missing something here.  I think that as soon as I have the MIDI board linked into Ch somehow then I'll be golden...but until then I'll just keep trying to figure this out.  Thank you for the help!

[alank99101739]

If you have a MIDI keyboard, when you plug it in does it control other software on your Windows box ok? This is step 1 - making sure MIDI events are arriving on your machine.

After that, there is nothing else to set up, but there are some gotchas. CH listens to all MIDI channels and all MIDI notes and control events. Some software you have to tell it what MIDI channel to listen to. CH just listens to them all - nothing to set up there.

I will try and create a little video sometime when I get a moment. It really was as simple as going into the control panel layout mode, clicking on a control to highlight it, then pressing a Midi keyboard key. It picked up the MIDI channel number and note number automatically. Then deselect it to make sure it did not get reprogrammed again by accident.

One of the gotchas is if you try to enter the MIDI note number by hand you can specify the note, but not the channel number. (Well, I could not work it out anyway.)

[KJerryK]

I'm not familiar with the Korg Kontrol Editor, but I have run into a problem with CH not recognizing a signal from a midi device if another app is opened before CH and is seeing the midi in. Perhaps the editor app was open before CH? When that is happening I had to restart, I'm on Win 10, and then open CH.

[ech6a]

I am also running Win10, so I will try this right now to see if I can get it to "set" to some of these other buttons.  Thank you KJerryK​!

[ech6a]

Hello alank99101739​ .  Well as stated below, my dials and toggles are linking up in Character Animator to control my Layer Picker, so the MIDI events are arriving on my machine.  So we're onto something here!

You have clarified a lot of questions that I am having a hard time articulating.  I was confused if I had to "do" anything in Character Animator to set up any of these buttons or toggles, but now I see that the Adobe Software just looks for any devices that have MIDI and automatically integrates them in.  That's really awesome!

Please don't worry about creating a small video - I hope you already haven't taken the time to do so!  I understand exactly what you are saying, and I've seen Dave address this in some of the Tips and Tricks tutorials.  If I can get all of the buttons on this controller to also automatically "lock" into the triggers in my Control Panel that would be awesome - as of now they aren't registering as anything.  As I talked about in my update, I think I may have to program the controller in the Korg Control Editor in order to get those buttons to register as notes.  They obviously aren't traditional keyboard keys, but I'm hoping that if I set the buttons to separate notes that they can also be used to trigger behaviors.  Fingers crossed on that one!

[ech6a]

Well, in nearly miraculous news, my sliders and knobs are now working seamlessly in Character Animator, which is REALLY exciting because that is the main reason I purchased this board!  Now I can start tweaking these control panels and have a lot more fun.

So it seems that Character Animator DID recognize the nanoKontroller.  Now I'm looking at the rest of the controller (pictured below) and I have a lot of other buttons, including a set of Stop, Record, and Play buttons.  I'd like to map them out so that when I press them, the corresponding functions are set off in Character Animator.  Is there anything I need to do within Character Animator to achieve this?  I think this is something I would set up in the Korg Kontrol Editor, but I don't know if anyone is familiar with a software like this.  It looks like I can program the board for different applications (which I think they call "Scenes"?), but I am unable to find or click on "Character Animator" in order to select it.

Also, is there any way I can use these buttons to activate triggers in Character Animator?  So that when I click on the trigger and press the button on my nanoKontrol, it will "lock" that button onto the trigger?  The buttons can be turned into "notes", which could be a key.

I think I may have to save my changes or "write the scene data" in order for these changes to take effect.  All I know is that if I press any of these buttons when my trigger is highlighted in the control panel, nothing is happening in Character Animator.

BUT as I mentioned before - my main problem has been solved!  I'm just glad I can use these toggles and sliders .  So if you guys have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about don't go overboard trying to figure it out for me.  I don't even have any idea if this Korg Kontrol Editor even resembles a DAW or any other type of recognizable software, so I thought I would get some feedback here. 

[ech6a]

EXCITING UPDATE - I DID IT YOU GUYS!!!  I was able to successfully map a note onto a button, and Character Animator is recognizing and registering these buttons.

Woohooooo.  What a great day!  Thanks to KJerryK​ and alank99101739​ for your assistance here !

[bk58407770]

I have the nanokontrol 2 as well. Were you able to map the sliders or knobs to anything? I want to know if it would be possible to smoothly move the arms and tilt the head with the knobs and/or sliders.  

[dunewidget]

I had the exact same problem that @ech6a had... I got my sliders and knobs working no problem, but none of the buttons on my Korg NanoKontrol2 would work. This post thread helped a lot, but there's a few details that would be useful for others to. So if you own a NanoKontrol2 (or probably some other boards as well) then lemme give you a few more pointers that might save you some time:

1. It appears the KNK2 (Korg NanoKontrol2) is set up so that when you press a button, it sends a "Control Change" message from the KNK2 to CH Animator. But CHA doesn't "hear" those messages for Trigger events. Instead, as @ech6a highlighted, you have to change the value you send to be a "Note" by changing the Assign Type.

After that, you have to do 1 more thing... these configuration changes you make can be saved as a file on your computer. But it wasn't immediately obvious to me what you do with those files besides just reading them in to the Korg Editor software. Those settings don't actually do ANYTHING... UNTIL you go into the "Communication" menu item in the Korg Editor software and the select "Write Scene Data." This now saves your changes to the KNK2 keyboard device itself. NOW you can go back into CHA, select your trigger in the Triggers menu, click into the "MIDI Note" input box, and then just press the button on your KNK2 and it will register. I'd suggest you go ahead and change ALL of the buttons to use "Note" as the Assign Type and then everything will work as expected.

Thanks again to @ech6a and the others who posted on this. I'm totally new to MIDI and got this all working in just a couple hours. Without this stuff, I would've lost a whole day... or week!

[dunewidget]

Also... one more thing...
You don't need to use "Toggle" as your Button Behvior. You can also use "Momentary" and in many cases, this works better. If you select "Toggle" that causes the button light on the KNK2 to "toggle" on or off. It also changes how CHA receives the button press... it causes you to need to press the button 2 times to change state in some situations. That is, click it once and light goes "on" and action is triggered in CHA. Click it again and button goes off but nothing happens in CHA. Click it a 3rd time and light goes "on" again and action is triggered in CHA... so you have to cycle through it and CHA only fires it's trigger action on every "on" event that comes from KNK2. By using "Momentary" the button lights don't stay on or off, BUT... every button press causes your action to be fired, which is probably the goal.

[alank99101739]

Theoretically yes, but remember draggers have an x and y value separately. So rotation can work, but just sliders are not that easy to use.

oh, I have not tried that device, but my midi keyboard slider works fine.

[bk58407770]

I'm just learning to use Character Animator, so I'm not familiar with the program at all.

So, you're saying a single knob or slider cannot be assigned to control, say a head tilt motion? If so, could you perhaps assign two knobs or sliders to control that movement?

[alank99101739]

There is no “head tilt” property that I can recall. You can use the webcam to record position data, but there are no manual controls for that behavior. You can put a dragger on instead, but then you have separate X and Y values. You *can* assign separate sliders to X and Y, I just found it painful to use in practice. Really need a joystick MIDI device.

You can also use Transform to rotate the head. But you cannot then use the webcam. Its one or the other.

I had a bit of fun playing the the MIDI support a while back. I wrote a program to use HTC Vive VR gear to turn positional data of the headset and hand controllers into MIDI events that controlled the puppet. But putting the headset on meant I could not see what I was doing!!! So not that useful in Practice.

[bk58407770]

I have this app called touchosc on my ipod, which sends x/y coordinate data to the digital audio workstation I use. I wonder if touchosc would be compatible with Character Animator.

I'm unsure how I can test if it is. I'm beta testing this character for a company, so I'm not working with the full retail version of Character Animator. Just a "player version" that has less features.

[K5CED]

Wtf