Pixel-art puppet

[IVPResearchLabs]

I'm fairly new to Character Animator but I've been working on using hand-drawn sprites then building a puppet using those sprites for real-time animation.  I looked around but there weren't any discussions or tutorials that covered this and I wanted to know if anyone could point me in the right direction.  The key issues I'm running into are that when I scale up the pixelated sprites they don't keep pixelation (which I want), and lip-syncing by switching between sprites has been a pain because even though I built all of the mouth shapes I'm using JUST the mouth shapes as my whole animation and it doesn't appear to be properly switching between them.  I hope I explained that right.  Also, I'd like for idle animations and such to automatically go between several sprites but it just seems to draw them all on top of each other.  I tried to mimic the boiling animation structure that Characterizer uses to switch between frames but it simply doesn't do it.  Anyway, it may end up being easier to share my character so people can see what I'm working with, but let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here since I think it would be an interesting technique that I'm just not seeing anywhere else.

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

Could you show the layer hierarchy of the artwork? Character Animator uses the hierarchy structure a lot. E.g. mouth positions will only be recognized if under a layer tagged as a Mouth.

Another behavior you might like to read up on is called "Cycle Layers" in the user guide. That might be what you are after. You put all the alternative layers under a parent (group them together) then add a Cycle Layers behavior to the group. That behavior will then display the children one after the other (animating them).

[IVPResearchLabs]

I actually figured it out... somehow my artwork was overwritten when I imported it into Character Animator.  A large number of the frames weren't kept, so when I went into character animator it looked like it wasn't properly using the frames. Moreover, I didn't know about the Cycle Layers so that definitely helped.  I fixed both of those and it's working well!

I do have one last question, somewhat related... is there a way to "calibrate" Character Animator's lip syncing?  It doesn't use some of the mouth shapes reliably, for instance once in a while it uses the "oh" shape but it will often skip it.  Should I just exagerate my voice?  It seems to me that would affect performance, but I do understand I can switch it out afterwards.  I'm mostly concerned with live stuff, in this case.

[Platty Puss]

One soution to your missing visine would be to copy and paste them. You can add, subtract, extend, shorten, etc. It might take some time, but you can do quite a bit of fenageling. Just open up your time line and you can see the individual visines.