Record new triggers while seeing old recording?

[stava1]

I have characters that have triggers for:

1. Body/head orientation: front, left, right, back

2. Eyebrows & mouth emotions

3. Hand gestures

I have a dynamic scene where characters turn around and interact with one another, and it's very important for me to have separate control for body/head orientation and the rest of the triggers. I'd like to be able to record them on top of one another while seeing old recordings.

What I've tried to do is to add multiple Trigger behaviors to my character (which works for solving the same problem with draggers) but unfortunately this does not work well with swap sets - the triggered artwork does appear, but the old one does not disappear.

Is there any way around this?

[oksamurai]

Yes, it's a little tricky but this should work:

• Add two more Trigger behaviors to the top level puppet, so you should see 3 Trigger behaviors in a row.
• Click the ... icon next to each one to rename them. Call one Body/head triggers, one hand triggers, and one eyebrow and mouth triggers.
• Now when you're recording, only arm the trigger behavior you want and disarm the others.

If you follow this, you should be able to see each part by dedicated one trigger behavior to each separate element.

[stava1]

Hi! What an honor, thanks for all those amazing videos.

I tried what you proposed, with the exact same names for the behaviors but I'm still getting the same result (the triggered artwork appears, but the old one does not disappear).

[oksamurai]

I just tried this and sorry — you're exactly right. What I recommended above works for simple single triggers like a blink, but swap sets will be confused and show the old artwork too because the trigger thinks it needs to stay active for the second behavior. Hmmm yeah...so I don't know if there's a great way to do this currently unfortunately.

[alank99101739]

Could you use Layer Pickers instead of swap sets? I have never used them in anger, but would that help keep the "swap set" concept separated by behavior, making it easier to control them? It does mean you would be using a slider... but you could record Replays per expression to control the slider, then put triggers on the sliders.... (egad!)

[stava1]

Sounds like that would work, I just wish there was a simpler way to achieve this with Triggers. @oksamurai This doesn't seem like an overly complex use case to support, do you think the Adobe team might fix this in the future?

[CoSA_DaveS]

For reasons that are hard to explain, adding this capability is challenging.

For the triggers that you need to see simultaneously, are they on separate parts of the character hierarchy? If so, you could try this workaround. Normally it would amount to applying Triggers to each part if the hierachy separately. But Triggers is special in that it’s only allowed to be applied at the top level. However, when you click on a layer group in the Puppet panel and choose Make "<group>" Shareable, it will automatically get a Triggers behavior. After doing that, both Triggers will show up in the properties panel, and you can arm/disarm them as needed (same scheme you are doing for Dragger). So if your puppet structure allows, you can make one or more parts shareable. This also places that group in the project panel for use in another puppet, but you don’t have to make use of that power, as all you need is that extra Triggers behavior.

If you use this scheme, I recommend not changing the layer hierarchy in PS/AI once you've started animating, otherwise you can lose your nested triggers.