Hard to make a suggestion without more details, but the most common unexpected problem I hear of is the independent arm group should have "Attach To" set to "Auto" in the properties panel (it is often the parent group name by default - which some have said is a bug for independent groups). You can then drag the circle over the torso at the attach point until it goes green indicating correct attachment. Oh, meshes are worth checking too. Click this little icon to see the meshes. Sometimes I have to set "Mesh Shape" to "Contour" instead of "Auto" for things to work correctly. Sorry if you have done all this already. (Your post is almost a week old, so maybe you have sorted it out already.) ... View more

Personally I now render each CH scene into a H.264 (MP4) file then load that MP4 file into Premier Pro.  It requires me to do everything in CH (camera pans, backgrounds, etc). But I find it much faster overall. I then add title dubs, background music etc in Premier Pro.  I also do any AE scenes (for special magic) the same way - I use dynamic linking to get the puppets into AE and in sync, then export a MP4 file to load into Premier Pro. You can export PNG sequences - the only way other than dynamic linking if you want transparencies to work (that I know of!).  For my laptop, PNG is faster than dynamic linking. But exporting a MP4 file plays full speed in Premier Pro, so while I have to manually re-export the MP4 files, overall it gave me the best experience. But this is what I do personally - I know a lot of people use dynamic linking instead. I just found it too slow on my hardware. ... View more

Have you tried dynamic linking the CH puppet into AE (I drag the puppet icon from the CH window into the AE window). That is, don't load the illustrator file into AE, dynamic link the CH puppet instead. (I was not sure exactly what you were trying to do however, so sorry if this is off base.) I find dynamic linking keeps everything in sync, but is sluggish on my little laptop. So I use it as a last resort, but it does work. ... View more

I found it a bit confusing because you put "smile" and "surprised" in the normal lip sync group, but other expressions ("angry mouth" below) have to go outside. So I have the following. (Hmmm, ignore "thick line" - that looks like a bug in my puppet!)  I put "angry", "smile", and "surprised" in the same trigger swapset. (Not sure if that is important or not.) ... View more

I think the blink replaces the other things in the same group. The following pattern is what I tend to follow these days. (I am not an expert however! I got something to work then just repeat it.) I also use keyboard triggers to select all the Surprised and Angry subgroups, to get expression on the face. (I adjust the eye dimensions.) +Left Eye Left Blink (I hide this, it contains blink image, this replaces all the following when a blink occurs) Left Pupil Range (I hide this, but it allows me to use a bigger range than the eyeball) Left Eyelid Top Neutral Surprised (hidden by default) Angry (hidden by default) Left Closed Happy (hidden by default, with a keyboard trigger to block everything following - just showing the upper eyelid often looks like the person has eye closed and happy for my characters) Left Eyelid Bottom Neutral Surprised (hidden) Angry (hidden) +Left Pupil  [CLIPPING MASK ADDED BY HAND] Left Eyeball Neutral Surprised (hidden) Angry (hidden) I then set "Clipping Mask" on "+Left Pupil" which makes the eyeball clipped by the whites of the eyeball, plus the eyelids are in front.  I also check "Left Pupil Range" to remove the automatically added "Left Pupil Size" (which means the eye size is the same as the range - so nothing moves!) and there was another autotag that it gets wrong (forgot what it is just now). The difference from what you are doing is the mask only applies to the pupil with the above arrangement, not the blink. So its just a matter of getting the grouping right so the blink is not covered by the mask (I think!). In illustrator it looks a bit funny because the pupil is bigger than the eye ball... But in character animator, it comes out nicely. Oh, the "Left Closed Happy" look I tie to a keyboard trigger blocks the lower eyelid, ending up with the following. Err, well if there is a smile on the face it looks happy... 😉  I splice the artwork around the eye into upper and lower eyelids. (hmmm, if you look closely above you can see I have the mask not quite right still - it cut off some of the blush on the cheek. I need to tighten up the mask. Showing the hierarchy in Character Animator... (This one is still a work in progress - I have not done the mouth group yet.) I hope this helps! ... View more

One thing that happens to me sometimes is I get an object in the wrong layer. The blue bounding box is the maximal range of all objects in that group. I use Adobe Draw and Adobe Illustrator, so what I do is pick that layer in illustrator then I "Enter Isolation Mode". Then I select all objects with lasos, rectangles etc. It will only select objects inside the isolation layers. (There may be a better way - I am not an expert here.) I usually find some little thing I put in the wrong layer. Once I move it to the right layer, it generally gets the bounding box correct afterwards. Good luck! ... View more

Did this issue get solved? I have the same issue, but its a pretty big twitch. I get around it by recording a MP4 file then using Premier Pro to remove the first few frames, but its not a very efficient way to work. Here is an example frame by frame. The hands are supposed to be not visible, in front of the character (he is writing at the desk), but the hands are all over the place for the first few frames. (It looks like it broke his wrists! Painful!)  I assume hands are aligned with the default body position of the artwork before snapping around to their correct orientation due to the bones etc of the rigging. Even a setting like "skip first 5 frames" as a setting it remembers would be helpful. Basically I would like it to stabilize before the actual frames of the scene start in the recording.  I tried various options with blending, but could not find a combination that solved the problem. I could defer the twitch, but it would not go away. Frame 1: look at the two hands (you can see the fingers on both sides of body). Frame 2: Frame 3: Frame 4: Note that the right arm is moving, but after frame 4 the hand is not visible. Puppet default position rear view (if helpful) Hmmmm. I have not tried changing the gap between the draggable and bones - I am too scared to change the rigging and potentially break/lose all my recordings, but maybe I can export and create a new project and experiment there. That may reduce the problem (but probably won't eliminate it). ... View more

I have had lots of Ch crashes, which is where I suspected they came from. I might just delete them all and see if they come back over time. But I will leave that for another day in case you want to poke around. (But I suspect not worth your time – I think just unclean exits of Ch left files behind). Alan Sent from Mail for Windows 10 ... View more

I am not exporting clips or anything to that directory. Its all generated by Adobe. So its sounds like a product feature request would be to allow the generated temp directory to be kept someone other than the project, so I don't waste my Creative Cloud disk space allocation (and upload bandwidth) on temp files. The temp.noindex directory seems to mainly come from the "textures" directory, which is lots of images files of all the different parts of the artwork of the puppets. $ du -h temp.noindex/ 633M    temp.noindex/compiler/sources/textures 738M    temp.noindex/compiler/sources 738M    temp.noindex/compiler 114M    temp.noindex/WarpCache 852M    temp.noindex/ Browsing the directory it seems like there are lots of duplicate files in there (different file name, same image). But there are also lots of tempNNNN.noindex/ directories. Can I safely delete these? Can I recover disk space by deleting the temp.noindex directory as well? $ du -hs * 39M     repo.noindex 852M    temp.noindex 20M     temp10104.noindex 17M     temp13384.noindex 18M     temp13816.noindex 13M     temp13884.noindex 14M     temp13904.noindex 12M     temp14768.noindex 14M     temp15212.noindex 20M     temp16048.noindex 28M     temp18716.noindex 8.0M    temp21552.noindex 18M     temp21572.noindex 16M     temp21584.noindex 14M     temp21752.noindex 18M     temp21784.noindex 13M     temp21884.noindex 17M     temp22064.noindex 11M     temp22448.noindex 14M     temp22984.noindex 14M     temp23436.noindex 185K    temp25044.noindex 19M     temp25944.noindex 14M     temp26464.noindex 16M     temp26896.noindex 13M     temp30512.noindex 13M     temp3852.noindex 21M     temp46640.noindex 18M     temp48184.noindex 20M     temp5000.noindex 28M     temp57584.noindex 15M     temp57608.noindex 18M     temp60768.noindex 21M     temp60800.noindex 15M     temp61288.noindex 15M     temp61648.noindex 16M     temp61664.noindex 21M     temp61728.noindex 24M     temp63072.noindex 18M     temp63128.noindex 18M     temp63480.noindex 15M     temp63572.noindex 15M     temp63668.noindex 15M     temp64024.noindex 5.2M    temp64312.noindex 16M     temp65844.noindex 16M     temp66284.noindex 19M     temp7104.noindex 13M     temp9100.noindex 18M     temp9876.noindex Thanks! ... View more

Thanks @ArtLone. "The more popular and easier option for puppets which you do not wish to edit is importing a transparent video file into After" - sorry, just re-read this. I am on Windows - I cannot find a video file format with transparency support - only "sequences" of single frame files (like PNG files). I suspect video will be faster than image sequences as it reduces the stress on the file system (does not have to open a new file per frame, and you can get better compression across frame boundaries to reduce total disk I/O). But the only mention I can find of a video format with an Alpha channel on Windows is the Lagarith encoder, and when I tried RGBA and loaded the result into Premier Pro, the alpha channel did not work. The only way I can get transparency working is with sequences (like PNG file sequences). Is there a way to get a transparent video file? Or did you mean the "sequences" support? ... View more

Thank you. Just as feedback, *on my project and hardware* the performance of puppet based imports has led me to the following. Try to do as much as possible in Ch and export each scene as a video file to drop into Pr - very fast in Pr to stich them into the final movie. Export as PNG sequence if you need to do work in After Effects (using the script) - it gives reasonable performance (x5 slower?) but is sometimes necessary as exporting PNGs preserves transparency information (I have not worked out how to export a video with transparency preserved - I would do that if I could) Import puppet as absolute last resort via dynamic linking into AE (x50 slower? Can wait a minute for a single frame to appear in AE before can layer effects etc on top). Makes working out the effects in AE like pans and timing very painful. Importing the AE compositions via dynamic linking into Pr then adds to the performance problems as extra overhead is added again.  (Note: Dynamic linking from Illustrator to Ch works nicely.) So while the Puppet linking is very nice, something about my setup makes it excruciatingly slow to the point of being unusable. I have to “render” the imported clip in advance to get anywhere (go grab lunch), then any change in the imported code invalidates the cache so do it all again. Exporting PNG sequences was a workable middle ground of functionality and performance, and I controlled when the cache was invalidated. I may be doing something wrong, but no idea what. Basically the PNG sequence importing made AE usable with Ch for me. Dynamically linking the Ch scene into AE was unusable performance wize. I have moved as many camera pans, gave up on blur effects etc, and just do as much as possible in Ch now and have been a lot more productive. Note: My artwork was drawn with Adobe Draw on iPad, so has lots of strokes and points on each stroke - probably a lot more detailed than if you just drew it in Illustrator directly. (I should try the other way as a comparison I guess.) Note: my laptop is a 2017 Microsoft Surface Pro 4, 2 core i7, 16GB ram, minimal GPU. I could believe it is a combination of poor laptop for graphics + overly complex artwork that is slowing it down. ... View more

Ah, thank you. I reviewed and found a number of such missing dangles (some were strange!) The pentagon button to show the mesh was useful too (I remembered it from before, but forgot it). I found a few more free hanging things around, but some where too hard to work out. Just selecting contour instead of auto did the job however. Thanks for tracking down the bug! ... View more

Thanks! To summarize, scrubbing with walk does not work. Click the "Refresh the scene" button before doing the playback to make sure everything is reset correctly before playback. ... View more

I have my project up in Adobe Cloud, and am happy to share it with you. Just reach out to my email and I will work out if I can just share the whole project with you then email you directly instructions on the most likely way to trigger the problems I typically see. ... View more

Recording walking is driving me batty! I want to record the character walk across the screen and stop. If I set the body speed to 0%, the character does not move. So I set it to something around 17% (100% I suspect due to other scale factors races off screen never to be seen again...). But when I play back, it does not show the same thing as I recorded. Scrubbing backwards and forwards does not scrub through the walk behavior. If I pause playback, the character keeps walking. I find if I select another puppet and come back, it sort of resets the position. But I was expecting to be able to scrub through the character walking across the screen. I will try 0% body movement and blending two positions (pretty ugly).  I did have it all working with 0% movement and using After Effects to do the keyframing, but its so slow I am trying to do it all in Character Animator - so much faster. ... View more

If I understand correctly however, it is not the same thing. I think the Dynamic Link approach rerenders each time you adjust the original file, where as dragging across the PNG files I think will only refresh if you regenerate the PNG files (so you control when it rerenders better, give a more responsive experience).  Dynamic Link might be better for your case, but I am struggling with the performance of it which is why I am digging deeper. ... View more

My latest solution - I increased the Illustrator file to a 5000pt high character (a ”giant”) and set it to “High Resolution”. So I am not using vector rendering afterall, but the default bit map is effectively a giant so I only need to scale down and never scale up the resolution. Then all the gradients etc still work. ... View more

Tweaking the file to avoid gradients and some of the other affects seems to have helped. Using the vector mode does scale well for everything else. It renders much more slowly, so I may leave vector off during normal editing and preview, then turn it on for the final render. My saddest thing is the eyes are currently a gradient, and in Anime/Manga the eyes are important and quite detailed. I might need to put an oversized image in there to allow zoom in face shots without using a gradient. The other mild disappointment is I had a few places I was using opacity for shadows. I use a black transparent area as a shadow - you can still see the original details through it, just darker for the shadow. This does not work with vector rendering mode, so shadows over a moving eye pupil are not possible to do. The shadow cannot be a part of the eye as it is not meant to move with the eye. (Oh well.) ... View more

Thanks for the suggestion. I did try the vector mode as well, but it did not work well. The face came out blotchy and I did not understand why. Thanks for the pointer on transparencies. I do use transparencies for the hair highlights and some shadows etc. Maybe some other areas are slightly transparent as well without me realizing. I will give it another go to see if I can eliminate the transparencies. (I used Adobe Draw on my iPad to create the first cut of the illustrator files. Adobe Draw on the iPad with the Apple Pencil is actually really nice, but its really a drawing app that happens to output an illustrator file, as distinct from an illustrator structured editor where you can control all the Bézier curve controls etc. So drawing a line really creates an outline path which it then fills at the low level. I could also believe there are some things that Adobe Draw outputs that are not working as well.) Thanks again, this has given me something to keep experimenting with. ... View more