Need help understanding Illustrator Layer Structure

Character Animator is quite flexible in supporting PS and AI documents with different naming and structure conventions. Maybe too flexible!

I do wish we had more consistency with the template puppets. My recommendation is this:

- Always have a top level group in your PS/AI document named "+Puppet". The "+" will make the layer an independent mesh, which you want for the entire puppet.
- Inside "+Puppet", use one of our view names, e.g., "+Right Quarter". Again, the "+" will make the view layer an independent mesh which is generally what you want. 
- Don't create redundant groups like "Body" in an effort to keep things clean. This forces everything inside that group to render in the same layer order position which prevents you from doing something like putting one arm in front of the head and the other behind the head. 

You do not absolutely have to name the layers anything, as long as they are in the right order. The exceptions to that rule are the visemes for the mouth (it's very helpful to have the correct names for those parts) and the head itself - not because CH needs to identify the head so much as it's far too easy for CH to "autotag" more than one layer as the head, causing all sorts of problems. The face parts also frequently get autotagged, so it's very useful to use the proper layer names for the eyebrows, eyes and so on. But if you need to, you can also add those tags in rigging, just as long as you're careful not to add the same tag to more than one layer.

You have to research that in the Character Animator documentation. There are some trigger names that help with setting up the structure in CA, but it is not a "must".

Naming the layers accordingly in Illustrator just streamlines the import. In CA you can also do the assignment.

Some of the sample puppets might be older. At that time, the naming and structure was relevant for importing them.