Could you use the "Export Puppet" menu item instead? When I tried your project file it went all weird for me. Exporting a puppet file I think is more reliable. (Its probably a path issue...) Generally its things like fixed pins or tags not being right. But sometimes its quicker to look at the puppet. ... View more

Nice video! I look forward to seeing the final result!  I love the pans you are doing. Sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean by not being able to use more than 2 inputs at once. I have not hit any limits so far, other than things getting slower. Could you expand a bit what you mean (if you would like some suggested hints). In big scenes I sometimes mute (click the eye ball) the other puppets while recording to save a bit of CPU. But I have never hit a limit on the number of takes layered on top of each other. It just runs slower while editing, but the final result has always come out right for me. The following is a fairly typical scene for me - what out of this do you call an "input"? Other things I do is always record audio separately, then use the "compute lip sync from audio" menu item - I never do it live. Maybe that takes a bit of CPU pressure off doing lip sync and rendering real time? I see what you mean by lip sync in your video - its quite bad in spots. I have not seen it like that before. You didn't accidentally drag the the mouth movements (Visemes) did you? I assume you realize you can edit and position each viseme individually.  Here is a zoom in on the visemes from the above (you might need to expand the image below to read them). You can see exactly how they align with the audio track, and you can edit them by hand to move/add/remove to fix errors if you need to. You can do it to frame level resolution, so there is no excuse for Character Animator to get that far off. My guess is you generated the visemes while playing back the video and recording inside Character Animator all at the same time (and your computer ran out of steam). If that is the case my suggestion is to make a copy of your scene (to be safe!), then delete the "Lip Sync" input, then select the audio track and your puppet, arm the "Lip Sync" in your puppet, and use "Compute Lip Sync From Scene Audio" menu item. See if that syncs up the mouth movements better. The computer does not have to do it real time that way. Hmm, or are you using After Effects to do the pans and the lip sync?? I don't have any experience with that way. I do as much as possible in Character Animator - but my pans are simpler than yours. In case any impact, I use Media Encoder to render each sequence to a separate movie file so most sequences don't get too complicated. (I then stitch together with Premier Pro.) Rendering takes much longer than playing the video inside Character Animator.  But my scenes are typically short (5 seconds is normal) - just my style. But if you render using that approach, there is no excuse for Character animator to get the lip sync that far off. Unless its After Effects (but even then...). In case useful, you can also generate videos from Character Animator with transparencies and composite them using After Effects - then AE is not generating the lip sync mouth movements... Just a thought. ... View more

Sorry, I found another scene with a much simpler timeline - probably a better example. The other one was the first one I ever tried, so had lots of mess I never cleaned up. Note this one I used the mouse to spike the wind up and down with the mouse, so the recording looks longer, but its just a quick spike of wind to align with the stamp hitting the face and "thud" sound effect. So in this case it was a true recording. Other times I do a solid wind recording then trim it back. Whatever works. ... View more

In case useful, here is my timeline for a scene. I caused "wind strength" to go strong for a short bit to cause the hair to blow out. (Don't ask me why my "Roasted" was so complicated - overkill probably. I was trying to tweak so you can see the eyes through the writing as it zoomed in.  "Surprised" was keyboard trigger for the eyes to open up wider. Here is the final effect (without the "Thud" sound effect). (Hopefully this animated GIF works here...) ... View more

Hi! You can record over a scene multiple times to add additional tracks. So you can do one effect at a time. You can even set the record speed to 50% or 25% to make it easier to time. For something like wind or gravity, I did an effect where the hair blows out on the face at a certain time. I just did a rough recording of the change (you just “arm” the gravity or wind setting). If you record longer than you need, you can just grab the ends of the bar in the timeline and trim it back. I often start recording, set the value to what I want, record for longer than I need, then trim off the start and move it to the position I want - that is, I don’t try to record everything exactly - I use the timeline window to move things around to the right times. Dragging on the other hand I tend to try and record exactly as editing is not really possible. If you record the same effect twice, the newer recording overrides the older one. So sometimes you need to trim the start/end to merge multiple recordings properly. Note: I often record one or two keyboard triggers at a time, then go back and record some other triggers, then use the timeline to do fine tuning of the timing. ... View more

Fun challenge! Hopefully someone like oksamurai​ will jump in with some advice for this more advanced sort of use case. (He knows all!) Some suggestions in case helpful. When trying to keep the position of something relative to the actual character, one thing I have seen is to include it in the puppet. That is, make the bar etc part of the puppet (a part of the arm). Then nail it down with pins etc so it does not move. That way the hands are glued to the bar because it is really the same artwork. You can change the opacity of the bar during a recording if you want to make them appear/disappear, or have a separate puppet (that looks the same) for with and without the bar. Another approach is to put a dragged on the hands then touch that dragged once at the start of the recording. It will remember that dragged position and not let the hands move. Sometimes I put draggers on the elbows too, to give me more control. If you don’t use them, they have no effect. I assume you would put draggers in the body to move the body up/down for the pull up. if the elbows flop the wrong direction, that is when I record a frame or two at the start so the elbows start in the right place. Remember you can slow down the recording time to give you more precise control over draggers while recording. There is a drop down next to the record button in the scene window to change the record speed and playback speed. Can be helpful. I have not found a way to stop stretching from happening completely, but slowing down the recording helps. E.g. using sticks you can control better where stretches occurs. E.g. you would put normally put sticks down the arms to stop bends in the middle of an arm, but it will still stretch lengthways. It is too hard to explain lots of options with sticks, but put simply, put sticks where you don’t want warping to occur. E.g. you might do one across the shoulders from arm joint to arm joint, with a small gap between the two arm bones and the shoulder bone. That might be enough. It is also worth thinking outside the square. You can put sticks in the body and arms and legs, but put the origin near the shoulders maybe. Then put dangles on the feet. That way the rest of the body will flop around, dangling from the shoulders. You don’t have to tag them with “Arm” etc tags if you are not using the walk behavior. You can adjust the springingness of springs to affect how much the body will (or will not) stretch from the dangles. But since you are doing something a bit different, expect to need to do some experimentation. Just remember that what is in front of other things is controlled by the ordering of the layers. So you need to nail that down first. E.g. the bar might really need to be two bars that just look joined in the middle, so one can be attached to the left hand and now to the right, where the hands are attached to one arm in front of the body and the other arm behind the body.  It could be tricky if the head is meant to be behind the bar. Even more tricky if you then want the head to go in front of the bar (e.g. the chin). That is when you start looking at creating two puppets (e.g. a head only) so you can play with the depth arrangement easier. Good luck! ... View more

I don’t think you can import videos into character animator. Normally you use After Effects or Premier Pro if you want to edit video. Character animator can generate videos (I export H.264 or Quicktime/GoPro Cineform with alpha if I need transparency) or you can use dynamic linking to bring things across into AE or PR.  But I don’t think there is a way to get a video in the background using Character Animator. ... View more

Most common reason I have seen is the “tags” not being quite right. E.g. “Left Pupil Range” being set on “Left Pupil“ or something like that, so the max range is the same as the eye size. To check that need to see the tags, which are under the properties. The group names you show are used to auto-tag the properties, but sometimes it gets things wrong. The three tags I check first are “Left Pupil” (so it knows what to move), “Left Pupil Size” (used to work out how big the pupil is), and “Left Pupil Range” (says how far the pupil can move). Typically your “Left Eyeball” group will get the “Left Pupil Range” tag, but if “Left Pupil” had all 3 tags set then pupil range and size would be equal, meaning it has no room to move. If you cannot work it out, if you can share the puppet (either direct message or share on forums here) I don’t mind having a quick look if helpful. ... View more

A stick across the shoulders in "Body" might help the head movements not causing the arms to jump around so much. You might want to decrease the "Face / Head Position Strength" property as well - e.g. 20% or less, to stop the neck stretching so badly - unless you want that effect of course! 😉 ... View more

Turning the sunglasses off, you have a few other little problems. Rename the "Blink" layer to "Left Blink" and "Right Blink" to pick up the auto tagging for "Left Blink" and "Right Blink" - eye blinks work better then. Also on the "Left Eye" layer, remove the "Left Pupil" handle you added. You don't want that there. (Right eye is okay) Rename the second "Left Pupil" to "Left Eyeball" (which should then autotag it with "Left Pupil Range"). The eyeballs should have the "Range" tags added for the eyes to move correctly. This defines how far the pupils can move. Make sure the two pupils have "Left Pupil" and "Left Pupil Size" tagged (and not more). After that it works nicely for me! ... View more

Sorry, I missed you provided a puppet!  Turn on independence for "Left Eye" and "Right Eye" (the little crown, or "+" at the start of the layer name). What is happening is the eye blinks are warping the entire head because the eyes are not independent to the head. Either that or you might be able to use blinks (set eyelid strength to zero to stop warping, and use blink replacement images instead of warping the eyelids for blinks). ... View more

Did you try putting "Right Arm" as the third child of "RA Triggers"?  Then you have an independent group for "Right Arm" without all the other cycles in it, but picking a trigger would hide "Right Arm". I personally don't know a way of automatically hiding a group with triggers other than them being siblings. I think its more a matter of getting the tree and independent groups organized "just right", like you have been trying. ... View more

Not sure if an answer, but what I do is export videos from Ch as much as possible, so it renders at the right size. I also went through and set any resolution settings (e.g. Illustrator has some settings somewhere - Document Properties I think) as high as possible. Not sure this matters, but I then copied each file across. I suspect the most important thing is to not export PNG images and then resize them significantly in AE. Instead, I think if you use "dynamic linking" then AE will ask the CH libraries to render at the resolution it wants them at. On my little laptop this is pretty slow, so I minimize the number of scenes I do it for (but I do use this for some scenes). It comes out fine for me then. E.g. drag the puppet from the CH window directly into the AE project panel, which creates a dynamic link. If you update in CH, AE will pick up the changes. But most of the time I personally now render videos per scene from CH as much as possible doing all the scaling there. E.g. to put a cartoon over the top of a video file, I will render using "QuickTime/GoPro Cineform 12bit RGB with alpha" - the "with alpha" meaning the video preserves transparency. Then I use AE to superimpose that video over my background video rendered by something else (Unity 3D generated video in my case). Unity3D example - YouTube I frequently now do full body shots or zoomed in shots of the face from the same puppet, with no fuzziness. Oh, I am using 6000x6000pt Adobe Illustrator files in case that makes a difference. Also in Illustrator if I go to "File / Document Setup", I pick the "High Resolution" drop down preset. I don't know if it makes a difference (once I got it working, I stopped fiddling) - just saying what my file is in case useful. In CH I don't use render as vectors as I want gradients to work - so CH is rendering as bitmaps - but I make sure what it outputs is the right final resolution (not a full body shot PNG that I then zoom in AE). ... View more

Sorry, could you provide a bit more detail? E.g. what you are doing, what you see as a result, and why its not what you wanted? Most useful tip I got from these forums as step 1 with warping issues was to click the little mesh icons, to see if the meshes were fitting your character correctly. If not, warping can go strange. There is a mesh icon/button on the bottom rig screen and in the scene screen. E.g. the scene window might show a point things are warping around you did not expect, and so give you a clue where to look next. ... View more

Thanks for the suggestion!  I think the problem is around getting origins and attachment points right, especially if you use Head Position Strength, Head Tilt Strength, Head Size Strength.  E.g. Head Size Strength makes the head bigger or smaller as you lean forwards/backwards. Sticks cannot (and should not) stop that movement. Also it feels more natural to have the head hinging on the neck near the the chin (low on the head), whereas rear hair dangling is more like half way down the head. I suspect sticks can help, but not completely solve the problem. (Or at least I cannot see how they can solve it.) ... View more

Hmm. The fact that the rip goes from the neck down over the shirt when you have separate pieces like the above also means its less likely to be the same as my problem. Assuming you have zoomed right in and checked its a closed loop for the neck (not just the start and end "very close" to each other, other suggestions are (1) in the scene window you can turn the mesh on as well - it might give you a clue to where the distortion is coming from (2) try changing the hair color and outlines (basically anything black) to see whether that "rip" is actually black getting distorted on top of the shirt (rather than a rip). If you changed all the black to oranges and blues etc, you might get a hint to its source. Also try changing the background color from black to white - if a gap in the puppet, the black should change to white. The other thing you can do is go into the artwork, try using the laso over the ends of the "rip" and see if there is a hidden object or point there you did not expect. Sometimes a single stray point can get Ch a bit messed up. Other than that, you need to the true experts here to solve it. A frequent request is to export and upload the puppet file if you don't mind it being public - then people can explore directly. ... View more

(If you click his response and mark as “answer” it helps other people know this is solved and find issues with solutions when browsing the forums.) ... View more

Sometimes I get a random object in a different layer that overlaps that gets it confused. I go into illustrator, laso all the objects in that area, then check the layer hierarchy to see if something was selected in a different layer than I expected. Other than that, as you say, go through each object in the hierarchy inside CH and see if there are any unexpected pins in other groups. Sometimes I drop a draggable somewhere by misclick in a nested group that I did not realize. I don’t know a better way than going through each object one by one in the hierarchy tree and checking each one. ... View more

If it was a different puppet per sequence, you could make the default positions of the artwork the starting point - but I assume you want multiple sequences from the same artwork. I would suggest looking at blends and single frame takes. You can do say a single frame take (CTRL-1) and fudge keyframing using blends. But if you had a single keyframe take at the start, you could then duplicate it and drag it to the end (or one frame past the end of the duration of the take). By blends, I mean you can do several one frame takes, then extend each one by dragging on the edges (if you zoom in close enough). You can then use the “blend” capability to go from one X/Y/scale value to the next. Sort of like poor man’s key framing. But I don’t know of a generic feature to do this. ... View more

I got something similar sometimes when I used laso to delete some points in a path using Illustrator, resulting in actually breaking the path without realizing it. When I carefully zoomed in on both ends of the rip (I would start at the neck in your example, where the wider gap is), I often found points in the path were not joined up. E.g. if stroke is turned on, you can see the stroke does not continue across all the points. Using pen tool to join up the little gaps solved the problem for me.  Might not be the same problem, but it looks the same as what I saw. I don’t know how to describe it well because I am still learning Illustrator as well - but I hit the problem quite often when using Adobe Draw to create some artwork, but then trying to simplify and clean up in Illustrator by removing excessive points it had created. ... View more

I don’t know the answer, but some random ideas in case helpful. If you take your “real” puppet and “duplicate” it, then replace the Il/Ps file with another file with identical layer structure, maybe Ch will keep all the tags etc? You can also try having two top level objects in the same Il/Ps file. (+MyCharacter and +MyCharacterLowRes as top level layers) You can then hide one and reveal the other, without losing all the puppet Movement recording data. Hopefully when you hide the high res images Ch won’t load them into memory... Or else just copy different files over the top of the puppet’s Is/Ps file. The trick however is to have the cut down Ps/Is file to have *identical* layer hierarchy (for the top of the tree where Ch cares about tagging etc) as the larger (higher resolution?) file. Then Ch should just think its an edit, and incorporate the changes like normal. But I don’t know - I have never changed the structure of a tree inside CH other than to duplicate, hide/show, and delete. ... View more

Have you checked how much free memory you have? Also there is a log file for media encoder you can bring up from the Media Encoder UI (not at a computer just now - I think you right clicked on the failed job). Or are you not even getting to media encoder? Is it CH coming up with the error message? Sometimes I have found exiting and restarting CH and Media Encoder cleared some issues for me. But screenshots or similar here might help - its hard to understand what you are doing exactly. ... View more

I would double check the tags on the left and right eyes. E.g. is there a “Left Blink” tag does differently to the “Right Blink” tag? I would go through every single node in the left and eye trees and check the tags carefully. (I assume you have the layer hierarchy the same for both eyes - hence tags is what I would check next.) Character Animator auto-tags based on layer names, so if you had a spelling error in “Rihgt” for example, it might be auto tagging one eye but not the other. ... View more

Not an answer to your question, but the workflow I settled on was to export videos per scene from CH and use dynamic linking as a last resort. I then used Premier Pro to stich the videos together, but I did all the key framing using blends and transforms in CH scenes. Of the variations I tried it was the most reliable and fastest for my little laptop. Note: Sometimes I have to exit CH and the media encoder and restart them to clear some issues with rendering. I would render, fail, exit all processes and restart, and it would work. But I could not repeat reliably. ... View more

This might be a good one for the “feature request” area. I tried a few options like turning off the recording to work out the current values, but you have to go back a frame as well. (So you could turn off recording, go back a frame, work out new positions in your head, go forward a frame, go back into record mode, position things, record that, ... ugly!) I think you really want a fourth mode (stop, play, record, and stop-frame-recording). For stop-frame recording I agree you want to see exactly what the previous frame was so you can adjust it.  When scrubbing through the timeline in this new mode I guess it should also show the previous frame all the time. This is a mode purely for stop frame recording. (You could get fancy and show the current and previous N frames as transparencies or something...) (I was wondering if something like this possibly useful for general scrubbing if you want to adjust (overwrite) a draggable. But because there is no key-framing, its probably easier just to re-record that section. It can however be tricky to get the position exactly right if you want to override part of a longer scene, but blending might help there (start the recording a little early and blend into the new real start value).  Personally I would like to be able to see and adjust recorded values in a drag - but it really is a request for keyframing draggables rather than what is currently there. E.g. do a single frame record of a draggable (and scale and Position X,Y transforms) every so often, and have CH blend between those single frames. You can do it with blends today, but its rather awkward. But the point is there is a similar problem - you want to know the current values and easily record over them - but going into record mode resets things to defaults for the armed values, making adjustments harder.) Hmmm. Another idea. (Maybe stupid.) Have a record mode where you see the current frame values. Then new stop-frame record command to move cursor forward before recording the new value. That would then be useful with scrubbing and stop frame recording. ... View more

Well, I had a quick experiment on a copy of an existing real puppet. I cannot get it quite right using the above approach. (In the production version of the puppet I currently warp the neck to get it to work.) The frontal with head straight up and down is fine. But as soon as I tilt the head, I have all sorts of problems keeping the rear hair aligned correctly. Getting the warped hidden neck and the independent Frontal group in front to stay aligned is proving hard with all the twisting, face zoom etc is hard. ... View more

americanjesus​ over in ​Confusion over UI system  had an interesting idea, if I understand it correctly. I think the suggestion is to use Head not warp independent then put +Frontal under that. Then put a neck and ball directly in Head. (I had started on this in one of the puppets, but did not get it quite right.) You then put +Frontal in front of Head to hide the neck and ball. You leave the "Head" tag on the "Head" group, and add the "Head" tag to the "+Frontal" group so both get head movement data. Character animator then distorts the neck and ball, but you don't see it because it is obscured by +Frontal. This works reasonably well. If you put the ball too high and move your head suddenly, it can be visible at times at the top of the head due to head distortions. But it you keep the ball just high enough to attach things too (+Frontal and +Pony Tail), then you probably will never see it. Oh, unless you set the head position strength to like 200% so the head goes right away from the body. Then the neck becomes visible as a "string" between the body and head. I tried to make the neck-and-ball transparent, but discovered 10% opacity and less disappears from the mesh outline. 20% and higher is visible. So I tried a very thin rectangle (a line did not work) and that minimizes what you can see. Another minor gotcha is it does distort the chest unless you put sticks in place to limit the effect of the neck on the body. Here is Thing4 using this approach. It works pretty well. I will try on my next real life puppet. My puppets don't have much head position strength, so this might work good enough for me and keeps things pretty simple. Thing4.puppet - Google Drive ... View more

With respect to UI inconsistency, I do find it confusing when there are multiple ways to view a timeline. Some have a scroll bar with a separate zoom factor (Character Animator timeline window). Some you can grab the edge of the scroll bar knob to extend/retract it (E.g. Audition, Premier Pro is a bit different as well.)  Sometimes you hit "enter" to change text (e.g. to label a handle) but you cannot right click on it to bring up a "Rename", sometimes you right click to bring up "Rename" (e.g. puppet names) - so I now try double click, right click, press enter on each thing to work out if there is a way to rename things I did not realize was possible before. A question on your beard however - "All I had to do was place the beard on top of the head". Could you expand on this? What was the exact hierarchy you used? Is the beard an independent group (to stop warping) but still under the Head group (so can be attached to move with the head group)? Could you expand? Thanks! ... View more