Floating character during stream

[jamesbelfer]

This one has bene driving me nuts and feel like I'm missing something obvious. I have a fish character that I want to be constantly floating up and down (never side to side) throughout an entire livestream. It needs to be something that's not a manual dragger because I'll be occupied mashing buttons the whole time. Anyone?

[alank99101739]

How long is a stream typically?

One old school idea - use cycle layers as you can loop it. Okay for short sequences.

New fangled idea. Use a replay with a trigger. Record lots of up/down movement. If a long stream, you may need to trigger to kick it off again, but you can record a few sequences and trigger different ones for a little bit of variation, when there is a pause in the main action.

I used replays hooked up to a midi keyboard for a stream. Just press some keys at times to keep it going - was not too bad. E.g. you can hook the angry expression midi key also up to a different fish sequence, so just using the main puppet nudges the fish along into different sequences as well.

You also have eye blink to introduce some variety (e.g. two cycle layers - a default one, and an autoblink triggered one).

[jamesbelfer]

this livestream is going to be about a half hour

it's part of the gag that he's just sort of floating there not really doing anything so variety not so important (we want it to be super lo-fi). regardless sounds like the replay option would get the job done. will let you know if i'm still stuck. thanks!

[alank99101739]

If you *want* it Lo-fi then I would be tempted by just using cycle layers in a loop E.g. set advance frame to once ever 0.5 seconds (not every frame), then make 8 copies of the same image, just sliding it up each picture. You can autoreverse the sequence too in cycle layers, which would make 16 frames. That would bob up and down forever every 8 seconds.