MIDI Keyboard or Best Alternative Recommendations

[RaizelDesign]

Hi everybody,

I've been working with Ch for a while now and I find that I'm quickly running out of keyboard alphanumerical keys to use for trigger purposes (I wish we could assign more keys to triggers) so I'm thinking it might be time to invest in something to help the situation. I've seen people post about controlling triggers with a MIDI keyboard. I don't know the first thing about those. What's a good budget one to get, how do they work, and does anyone have recommendations on where to start? Or is there something totally different that I should be looking into?

I don't know if it's relevant, but I'm mostly working on a desktop PC and occasionally on a Surface laptop (laptop is much less relevant as it's getting on in age and may have to be replaced with something more animation-friendly soon anyway). Also, to clarify, I don't stream these animations live and what I see surrounding MIDI online seems to be geared more toward livestreams. Would it still work for plain ole recording?

Thanks! I appreciate any advice you can offer.

[ElectroPuppet · Accepted solution]

It might be a silly question, but have you looked at using your controls panel to access your triggers?

I use the controls panel to trigger all my hands - and keyboard triggers for things like replays and facial expressions.

[RaizelDesign]

It's not a silly question. I was under the impression that the controls panel was just a different interface for the triggers - that you still had to have a trigger key attached. I thought it was meant to make live stream easier and since I never do live streams and I'm pretty much always working in a time crunch, I haven't really looked into it. I guess I'm very wrong and I should check that out. Thanks for the suggestion!

[ElectroPuppet]

The controls panel is a visual interface to all your triggers. Perfect if you have triggers you don't want to assign a key to. As I said, my lesser used triggers I don't assign a key to - but I always have access to it via the controls panel. No limit to what you can create in there! I also organise the control panel so it is the same for every puppet.

[RaizelDesign]

I want to redo a set of puppets' eye gazes using this hack from okay samurai so I think the control panel just might do the trick. Thanks!

[ElectroPuppet]

Perfect! One last thing, if you add a lot of triggers to the control panel you may want to move the window to better display everything. It used to share the timeline window - but has been moved to the triggers window.

I move it back where it used to be, as I prefer the additional real estate. It is easy to drag where you want it but here is a tutorial, should you need it.

https://www.electropuppet.com/moving-the-controls-panel/

Good luck!

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks! You've been very helpful.

Yes, I have my Ch screen totally rearranged - especially to take better advantage of my two-screen setup at work. I'll see where the controls window works best for me and move it.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks so much @ElectroPuppet ! I should have tried this earlier.

I created a swap set for my eyegaze using the dragger hack, and then since no icon showed up in the control panel (because it's triggering a dragger movement I guess), I went ahead and made custom icons and added them to the controls panel. I'm hoping to reuse the icons for all my puppets so it doesn't take me too much time to start using this system. I still need to tweak it in the timeline since the transitions between swaps aren't as seamless as when I use the trigger keys, but since I get way more triggers out of this, I can't complain. It's not perfect, but so far, so good.