I noticed you have the “Fixed” pins and bones in the “Body” layer. I don’t remember the exact rules, but there was something about pins fixing positions relative to the parent (or next independent ancestor... something like that). So you might want to try putting the Fixed pins for the feet on the FSC root layer if you want it pinned to the scene. See if that helps. No idea about the twisting - never heard of that before!  Only suggestion is to see if position of dragger relative to the bones makes a difference. E.g. the dragger is currently right next to (but not on top of) a bone/stick.  Oh, another idea is to turn on the yellow mesh in the scene view (click the little mesh icon at the bottom of the scene window) and see if you can pick up any hints as to what is going on by watching the mesh (Is the mesh twisting too? What is it twisting around?) You can use ALT+wheel in the scene window to zoom in on the hand to watch it more closely as well if needed. Otherwise hopefully and expert can help. Note: it is usually easier to debug with a copy of the puppet - either sharing publicly, or DM someone a private link so they can try. I don’t mind trying (I learn from it!) but I am not an expert. But I find quite frequently it is simple non-obvious things that trip people up. ... View more

I don’t know Ch well enough to tell you all the approaches that can work. But I never got a combination going with too much going on inside the mouth group - the Mouth behavior seemed to get confused pretty easily. So I always follow the following pattern now Mouth Group Mouth Neutral Smile Surprised F Ah (all the vizemes, and nothing else as direct children) Cry Happy Yawn That is, the “Mouth” group had direct children of all the vizemes, with no other magic in there. I usually create a swap set on the Mouth group so I can use a keyboard trigger for smile, surprised, etc. Neutral is the default for the swap set. Then I create a second swap set for Mouth Group with “Mouth” being the default. I add new triggers for the other mouth positions. Cleverness under the Mouth group that I tried always messed up, so I tried to avoid it. You may very well be able to get what you are trying to do to work, but I had lots of failures doing anything complex under “Mouth”, even just trying to add “Cry” under Mouth gave me grief. So I now put any other keyboard triggers as siblings to the Mouth group, so you get the Mouth group (controlled by Character Animator) or one of the other special mouths. Character Animator seems to get less confused the simpler you keep the hierarchy. Your hierarchy had things like “Neutral” with a layer under it plus a sibling of “Sad Neutral” (a cycle layer?). I would suggest having either a static layer or a cycle group directly under Neutral - not more complicated hierarchies. Then once you find a pattern that works, mimic it as closely as possible over and over again. So not an answer to your question, and you may very well be able to get it to work like you want, but I recommend simplicity whenever possible, and minimizing cleverness under “Mouth” as the behavior I think makes assumptions about how Mouth is structured. ... View more

If you run out of options, sometimes I just do two different scenes and carefully splice them together in premier pro. Or single frame dragging. I remember one crosseyed scene  wanted. I tried to do it with extra behaviors etc on the eyes , but ended up just photoshopping the couple of frames I needed it for in a few seconds. ... View more

Just be aware that render as vector does not support some features such as gradients. I create a 6000pt illustrator file, pick “high resolution” in the illustrator doc properties, and scale in up/down the artwork in character animator without issue to 1080p. ... View more

Tried to download the file in case something easy, but it came up with "permission denied". ... View more

Nice! Thanks for sharing! 🙂 ... View more

I especially love the ostrich! ... View more

[The following is just suggestions - I have not tried to do it.]  Are you trying to use the automatic walk behaviors? Or just going to use draggers? If just draggers, I don't think it is any different than two legged - Character Animator will just move the draggers around as you ask - put one on each leg and start dragging! If you are trying to use the walk behavior, I think I recall reading somewhere suggesting putting two walk behaviors (one for front legs, one for rear).  Character Animator I don't think cares about the shape of the body - it just knows to move feet relative to the waist etc when walking. The actual shape of the puppet can be anything you like. That is, in the artwork maybe trying grouping the front legs under a common parent that you mark as a waist with a "walk" behavior added, then group the rear legs is a separate group doing the same thing. As long as both are armed at the same time, I think they will both get keyboard commands etc when you want them to move.  (But I have never tried it.)  The other thing you could try is one walk behavior, but mark multiple handles with the same tag - so there are two left feet, to right feet, etc. Hopefully it will move both feet in sync then without having two walk behaviors. ... View more

I find both fun and frustrating. I finally got one episode done (working on the next ones now). I am just publishing on YouTube. http://extra-ordinary.tv/ (direct link: Friendship (Extra Ordinary, Episode 1) - YouTube ) - bible verse based series for kids. It's been really interesting going through all the stages from script to voice acting to drawing artwork to animation to music and sound effects. Apart from time required, my biggest delay has been finding some friends to do character voices! Love to see if you produce something! I find it very interesting all the different styles people have. There are some very creative people out there! ... View more

I would suggest starting a new topic asking for best hardware set people have found. I suspect answer will be as many fast cores and fastest GPU and big memory with SSD etc as you can afford! 😉 But it I don’t have any special knowledge here. My desktop has 32gb ram, gtx 1080, 4 core i7. I got it for VR. Wacom I hear of a lot, but zero experience with it. This is just a hobby For me. ... View more

"Advice" may be too strong - "suggestion to try as a comparison" would make me feel better. My laptop does not have flashy graphics chips, so struggles at times. For me, exporting videos make it more usable because of machine power. I do however use dynamic linking at times. For the workflow I follow, I found exporting videos gave me more control - editing was faster, but I took on more burden keeping things coordinated. So I suggest trying both approaches and see what works better. If you export videos, be aware you can export PNG sequences, but you get lots of files. I found QuickTime GoPro CineForm RGB with Alpha (the "with alpha" means the video supports transparencies) better because you get one movie file. I recall it being faster to work with on my laptop, I suspect because it did not have to load lots of individual files. But once you settle on a way of working that works for you, stick to it! I tried a few variations - I know dynamic linking works hugely better on my desktop (top of the line GPU, lots of RAM, more CPUs etc), so its not the feature is broken, just if you run out of CPU etc you can really notice it. ... View more

Oh, and I was after frame level precision. Having to hit a key or click a button at just the right time, and not being able to go back and adjust it down to frame level resolution would be very painful. ... View more

The other painful part is while editing in Character Animator you don't see the twitch/bounce. It's only visible when you export to a media file or (I suspect) use dynamic linking (which I personally try to minimize for performance reasons). So I don't know how long to skip until AFTER I have built a scene and try to render it. Only then I can work out how much of the start I don't want.  (Personally I export a MP4 file then use Premier Pro to work out how much to remove from the front.) ... View more

When I do a new recording that goes beyond the previous scene duration, it does automatically extend the duration of the scene. That is the problem. I understand that sometimes this is useful, but it is also often painful. When layering takes one on top of the other, it is hard (impossible) to hit the "stop recording" at the same time for all takes. So you need to record a bit longer than needed to be safe. But doing so extends the duration. The last suggestion I had is probably still my current favorite. Introduce two new optional properties or markers so I can say "I REALLY want the recording to start here, and I REALLY want the recording to end here." Could be properties (like Duration), or special marker types (like the "End Marker"). But the idea is if I set them, I want them to be used no matter what. They don't change because a recording goes beyond the markers.  (If they are not set/used, then the current behavior stays exactly as is.) The start offset (skip N frames of the take before you start exporting real frames) stops things like hand twitching with draggers, or excessive hair bouncing for long hair at the start of a scene. How long to wait depends on the hair length, gravity etc - so I don't mind setting it by hand. The end offset is so I can set it, and recording beyond the current end point DOES NOT extend the length of the exported clip. First example: zero draggers or anything recorded. Notice the bobbing hair. So I want to set the start time say a second into the scene so the hair has finished bobbing up and down. Zero movement again, but this time I dragged the hands before recording the scene. Nothing is moving in the scene - it just I guess is jumping from the default position to the dragged position in the first frame, causing the unwanted twitch. This is the twitch I want to get rid of again by skipping the first few frames of the scene so it can settle down. I can do it in Premier Pro etc, but its a pain - I have to redo the export each time. For the end point, here is a random scene I just grabbed for illustration. If I want to record a drag over the top of this scene, I need to make sure it goes at least as long as the scene - so I overshoot the recording, and then have to set the duration back to the old duration each time. I manually put the marker in now to remind me where the end point should be. ... View more

I don't think its possible. I agree it would be nice though - a "stretch strength" or something. Still want elbows etc to flex - but not have arm stretch (get longer). There is an interesting hack however (so it might get "fixed" without notice). When you start with a puppet, you get a "Dragger" behavior at the top level. It gets control over all the draggers under it you add during rigging. If you put a new Dragger behavior on a child layer somewhere, all the draggers under it get associated with that behavior instance instead  (not the root one). Nothing magic so far.  (Note, if you expand the "Dragger" in the properties, it tells you how many draggers exist in the tree of layers under it that the Dragger behavior controls.) HOWEVER! If you put a second dragger behavior on the puppet root, so there are two Draggers at the same level in the tree, both get control over all draggers beneath. What seems to happen then is the actual drag coordinate is based on the average (??) of the two draggers. That is, if you arm the first dragger and move the hand to a particular point (e.g. beside the body in the original rest position) and record it for the length of the clip (not moving, just staying still), then you disarm that dragger and arm the other dragger, then what you find is the second dragger has less impact. You can move the mouse further away without stretching. Because Character Animator does not compress arms etc (only stretches them), it seems to sort of work. Here is an example - see how the Target Handles of the default Dragger behavior (called "Dragger") and the second Dragger behaviour (added by clicking the "+" symbol next to the "Behaviours" heading) both list the same Target Handles. In the recording timeline, you can record both Dragger behaviors independently. (I am suggesting to keep one unmoving, and the other moving.) But I would classify that as a hack! Probably not what you were after! And the more I play with it, the more unreliable it seems. Alan ... View more

Ah, gotcha!  Character Animator tries to auto-detect the outline, but sometimes fails. It is usually because there is some discontinuous object in the layer. There is a property that you can set to “Contour” to force using the outline instead of the default “auto”. You could try just setting that.  Otherwise (or as well!) try going into AI/PS, go into isolation mode for the suit, then try using the laso tool around the suit to see if you can highlight something that snuck into the wrong layer. The other thing to try is clicking the little mesh icon at the bottom of the “rig” and “scene” windows. It shows the mesh it allocated to the layer. This is very important to get right otherwise things will distort badly later. Sometimes it highlights the area that is wrong (the mesh looks funny around a point you did not expect). Regarding artwork quality, looks good to me! I am a programmers with zero formal art training, so I cannot speak either! ;-).  As long as its fun, who cares what it looks like... which I can say since this is a hobby for me, not work. ... View more

The pattern I follow is to have a "Mouth Group" (not sure that is the right name, but whatever) with all the mouth triggers in it. Then also in that group is the "Mouth" layer. So the triggers when fired hide the siblings (including the "Mouth" layer with the lip sync alternatives).  Your hierarchy seems to have the mouth group outside the trigger group, meaning when a trigger fires it won't hide the normal mouth (hence you see two mouths). Here is the pattern I follow now. "Mouth Group" with triggered different expressions, with "Mouth" one of those choices.  "Neutral", "Smile" etc are inside the "Mouth". ... View more

Sorry, I don't understand your description, but I thought that Illustrator clipping masks were not understood by Character Animator. It just understands the transparencies in Illustrator files. There is a clipping mask concept inside Character Animator you can turn on, but I suspect you are not using that from your description. Could you share a screen shot perhaps? ... View more

Yes, I also found the QuickTime GoproCine with Alpha channels worked well. ... View more

Have you looked at the rigging to work out if there is a pin or similar at that point? The “mesh” icon can also help sometimes track down such problems. (There is an button on the bottom of the rigging and scene window/panels that cause a yellow mesh to be displayed.) In your case it sounds like you know the exact position. I would check first for a pin at that location, otherwise some handle. If you cannot identify it, sometimes it might not be in the layer you expected - in which case I sometimes duplicate a puppet (Edit/Duplicate) then start deleting parts of the puppet in the rigging window (not the actual artwork file!!). Sometimes its a stray handle due to an unintentional mouse click. Otherwise sharing the puppet is usually the quickest way to identify a problem. I don’t mind having a look one evening - I usually learn something in the process! But the above is what I generally do to try and track it down. Oh, and sometimes I think I found something like putting a tag or name on an origin made it behave a bit different to creating a separate handle with a name on it. (But I don’t recall exactly.) My most successful strategy is the “keep deleting things until it starts working” to work out the root problem. Not very technical, but it works! ... View more

Not an answer, but I find pulling out headphones (and replugging) can turn off the volume sometimes (not sure exact sequence). Going to “Preferences / Audio Hardware” and changing the hardware to speakers and back to headphones seems to reset things. (Not a solution - but might be quicker than exiting and restarting.) ... View more