I am having a go at using collisions to throw a paper ball at someone's face and have it bounce off.  My first challenge is I cannot work out how to get the collision to work on my fairly complicated person puppet - it just goes right through. If I try "collide" tagging other simple puppets, it works fine. I worked around it by putting a collidable puppet behind my person puppet - it's good enough. But I want the person to react on their facial expression, which means getting the timing right. At present as soon as I reset the scene the object starts dropping, so I cannot start playing the scene to work out if the timing is right. Is there a way to do this? (I am going to try using a particle cannon next, so I trigger the paper ball within the scene. Hopefully that will sync the two up. But wanted to know if I am missing a better way to do this.) ... View more

Currently I don't use the built in Character Animator 'walk' behavior as when I tried it last, it did not behave exactly as I wanted. (I will try again one day.) But a useful thing of the walk behavior is the head bobs up and down. I am currently simulating this using "Position Y" recordings to move up and down. But it is time consuming, and not usable in a live recording. Looking at the "Wonder Boy" sample, it uses cycle animation to make it look like the boy is walking towards the camera - but the head is perfectly still (not bobbing up and down).  (Reminds me of the movie "Mars Attacks" - the aliens have this glide movement where the head stays still as the body walks.) That left me with the idea of setting up a puppet with only "waist" tagged and attaching a walk behavior. Having "waist" tagged (and nothing else - e.g. no "neck" tag) will bob the puppet up and down (if you set all sideways movement values to zero), so I thought maybe trigger the walk animation at the same time as a cycle layers animation - then I can control what the walk looks like, and the head (and body) bobs up and down. I think this will work - but I assume I will have to work out how many frames are in a standard walk cycle to make sure the cycle layers lines up exactly with the bobbing up and down. If you want to change the walk speed, sorry, you are on your own! (Redraw the cycle layers again.) Animator gives you no support to sync up walking with cycle layers. A further complication is you can adjust the start/end of a recorded trigger take for cycles, but the walk for left/right is hidden inside a recording - you cannot adjust it easily - you would probably have to re-record it. That makes lining up the walk and cycle layers finicky. Is there something I am missing?  Walk, trigger and cycle layer behaviors mentioned that maybe in the future it will be possible to use something other than arrows to cause a walk to occur - I assume normal keyboard triggers. That would make aligning cycles and the walk behavior on/off easier. Does this exist already? But it would seem nicer if cycle layers and walking behavior were linked better. It seems tricky to work out a "cycle layer" frame count and a "walk step speed" (and "step phase"!) so they all line up nicely. While I am typing... the other thing I noticed is if you use pins, they can mess up using the walk behavior to make the character bob up and down. (The pins stop the bobbing near the pin.) The easy solution is to use more bones (sticks) instead of pins. E.g. pin the feet and nothing else - use bones to stop unwanted mesh distortions. That left me with another interest effect. When I got rid of all the pins on my puppet (except the feet), dragging the hands caused the body to lean over quite a bit. No bone variations I have tried have stopped this. While walking. the puppet does not lean over - because the walk behavior is forcing the waist to the mid point. Dragging the hands while walking is actually pretty good. So my next experiment was to put a draggable on the waist handle. Then if not walking, I touch the dragger to make it record a setting. That works okay (when combined with appropriate bones in the body). The character does not lean over much any more dragging the hands around. But if the dragger was on at the same time as the walk, the walk up and down motion strength was halved. So I would have to carefully the record waist drag so that either it is set or the walk behavior is active (or put up with the walk up and down bobbing being reduced in strength). That that is a pain for combining with cycle layers (where I started above). So my final variation is as follows. Sorry if obvious. Its not perfect, but it seems "okay". Put pins in below the waist to lock down the body from unwanted movement, not too close to or above the waist. This sufficiently reduces the lean from dragging the hands. The pins only stop movement below the waist, not above - the head and shoulders bob up and down (I set the sideways movement settings all to zero so walking and makes the puppet go up and down). That should allow me to do a cycle layer to show the legs moving - as long as I manually compute the timing right for the number of cycle layers based on the speed of walking for each puppet. Before I start playing further, is there any way to better synchronize the walk behavior and cycle layers? This is the bit I am missing. ... View more

It would be nice if you could grab the white line representing "end of scene" and adjust it by dragging. At present you have to type numbers into the "Duration" property by hand I think. This would make it quicker to re-adjust the duration when your recording extends the duration. I don't mind having to grab it in the bar at the top, or below all the tracks. Its just typing in Duration by hand you don't get all the snap effects etc. Could go further and allow dragging of the scene start as well, so you can have things before the scene start - which would allow the twitching of characters at the start of a scene to be clipped out. (That is, introduce a separate "Skip Frames At Start" property, as mentioned before. The same dragging should be possible for the start and end of a scene.) Or introduce "start of scene" and "end of scene" marker types.  If I use them, they control when where the scene starts and its duration. Maybe "Duration" and "Skip Frames At Start" properties are automatically calculated if those markers exist. (Recording beyond the end of the end of scene marker does not increase the Duration property if an "end of scene" marker exists.) ... View more

Currently tracking the mouse movement for eye gaze is relative to the middle of the screen, not the actual eyes or head of the puppet. So if the puppet is not in the middle, you have to use a bit of effort to work out where the middle is. This is a bit painful during a recording. (It's not terrible, more annoying.) Also, if you added this "eyes track mouse/touch" option, it would be nice to add a "eyes track independently" option, so the two eyes look exactly at the position of the cursor, allowing the puppet to go cross eyed. It gives a more control over depth perception (and can more easily create humorous cross eye situations). I am going to try and work around it by creating two independent eye gaze behaviors and record them separately, otherwise just splice it in after effects/premier pro. I only need it for a few seconds. But I thought I would mention it as a suggestion as it felt like a fairly common thing - e.g. you can arm 3 puppets concurrently and have their eyes all track a fly going past perfectly in sync, including having it land on the nose of one of the puppets. I can imagine all sorts of humorous scenes that would be easier to create with this. ... View more

When using draggers for a jointed arm, sometimes you need to be careful to extend the arm out sideways or else the arm joint might flip the wrong way. (There is probably the "right" way to do bones to minify this...  happening. My best strategy so far is to try and perfectly line up the two arm bones, then add a dragger for the elbow to use in emergencies.) For example the following shows left and right hands with draggers ending up in the same position, but the one on the right move straight upwards and resulted in the arm flipping inwards. The easy work around is to move the dragger in an arc from lower to upper position, so the arm extends out straight. But I find getting this arc right hard to do still. If you go out too widely, the arm will distort and stretch. You don't get distortion staying close to the body because of the bones. Bones dont allow compaction of the arm where the bone is. However they still allow stretch. Is it possible to turn off this stretch? Or define a mesh or dragger parameter that says the max stretch allowed - some way where I can do a big generous arc with the mouse without the arm stretching at the same time. The drag point would be in the direction of the mouse, but limited how far out it can go. This would hopefully help me make movements faster and look more natural, without having to get the mouse trajectory "just right". PS: I know I can slow down the recording speed, which does help - just wondering if there was another setting I had missed. ... View more