Feature Focus: Puppet Maker

[Jeff Almasol]

Fun, fast, diverse character creation for everyone. No need to be an expert Photoshop or Illustrator user. And no need for rigging skills. Choose from a variety of character styles. Then with the simple interface start customizing the character by picking hair styles, skin tones, accessories, and much more, and seeing your character react to your movements and voice in real time. 

 

Creating a custom puppet using Puppet Maker

1. Open Character Animator (Beta). 
2. Click the Puppet Maker tile or Make a puppet button on the Home screen or choose File > Open Puppet Maker.  
3. In the Style section, select the puppet’s base style. 
   Move the mouse pointer horizontally across the style’s thumbnail (i.e., hover scrub) to view some of the possible looks that you can create.  
4. In the Customize section, choose different looks for the puppet, or click  Randomize to try a random combination of looks. 
5. In the Play section, preview how the puppet moves and changes appearance using its available controls. 
   These controls will also be available in the generated puppet. 
6. View and interact with the puppet at any time in the preview area. 
   Move your head and body in front of your webcam, talk into your microphone, and for puppets that support Dragger even drag in the Preview area with your mouse or finger on a touch display. Press trigger keys for available controls in the Play section. 
7. Click Generate. 

A puppet with the selected style and customizations is created and added to a new scene ready for you to control and record a performance – no need to rig the puppet at all! 

If you want a puppet with a different appearance, just open Puppet Maker again, make new selections, then generate a new puppet. 

Refreshing the preview area and controlling camera and microphone 

Along the bottom of the Puppet Maker window are controls for refreshing the preview in case you want to reset a character’s swaying hair or other parts controlled by physics, for calibrating the camera to a starting pose for face and body tracking, and for turning on or off the camera or microphone. 

Adding new styles (templates) to Puppet Maker

Puppet Maker comes with a small set of built-in styles or templates, but you can add new Puppet Maker templates to add to the available styles for new puppets. These Puppet Maker templates are .maker files on disk. They will be available from Adobe and third-party puppet sellers in the future. 

To add Puppet Maker templates, do any of the following:  

• Choose File > Import, then select one or more .maker files to add. 
• Double-click the .maker file in Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows). 
• In a Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows) window, navigate to your user Documents folder, then into the Adobe > Character Animator (Beta) > Puppet Maker subfolder, and then drag one or more .maker files into the Puppet Maker subfolder. 

Importing or double-clicking a single .maker file automatically installs the file into the Puppet Maker subfolder, opens Puppet Maker, and selects that .maker file’s style in the Style section. 

If you copy .maker files into the Puppet Maker subfolder on disk, the templates will appear in the Style section the next time you open Puppet Maker. 

Troubleshooting 

• If you have multiple camera sources and the character isn’t responding to your movements, the wrong camera might be selected. Close the Puppet Maker window, then select the preferred camera in the Camera & Microphone panel’s menu. We plan to provide the camera selection menu in the Puppet Maker window’s controls in a future Beta build. 
• If the character’s mouth doesn’t change as you talk into your microphone, check that you have the preferred default audio input. Close the Puppet Maker window, open the app preferences (Character (Beta) > Preferences on macOS, Edit > Preferences on Windows), then selected the preferred device for Default Input. 

Known issues and limitations 

Puppet Maker is still in development. 

In this first public Beta version (v22.0.0.7), please note the following: 

• Puppet preview updates are slow right now: Changing styles or customize options can take up to a few seconds to update the preview. We’re working to make selection changes more responsive in a future Beta build. 

What we want to know 

We want to hear about your experience with Puppet Maker:  

• What are your overall impressions?  
• Are you able to customize and create a puppet that meets your needs? 
• How do you think you might use Puppet Maker in your work? 

• How can we improve Puppet Maker?  

Also, we’d love to see what you create with Puppet Maker. Share your animations on social media with the #CharacterAnimator hashtag. 

Thank you! We’re looking forward to your feedback. 

(Use this Beta forum thread to discuss Puppet Maker and share your feedback with the Character Animator team and other Beta users. If you encounter a bug, let us know by posting a reply here or choosing Report a bug from the Provide feedback icon in the top-right corner of the app.) 

[Damien Mustaphi]

I really like where this is going and the new ability to generate characters within the After Effects Panel is amazing. Way to go team!

I have a few plug-ins that I use for motion graphic projects that I use to port over graphic designer's layers from Illustrator into After Effects, in order to animate each layer and create motion graphics, transitions, etc. – it would be great if there was a way to integrate something like this to be able to take a character in Illustrator and port it over to the After Effects Panel to see where the layers are falling in the character maker screen and to see what needs to be tweaked/modified and properly broken out for each part of the rig and for accessories.

For example, if the Illustrator layer has only been called "head", but it contains the character's hair, ears, eyes, nose and mouth, it would be nice to have a Puppet Maker widget window that you could highlight your "nose" layers and then select "nose" from the Puppet Maker widget window, and it will port the nose layers over to the After Effects Panel, under the "nose" category. You could jump back into Illustrator and continue adding all of the remaining layers and they would continue populating in their selected categories.

This would make it super easy and user-friendly for Illustrator users to break apart their Illustrator characters if they haven't been designing characters using the proper layer structure and following the naming process for Character Animator.

Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing the final release!

[oksamurai]

Yes, I think a lot of what you're asking for is covered in the upcoming "authoring mode" that will let anyone create their own maker characters. I made the "Watts" template and I was able to add new things like noses, hairstyles, colors, etc to the original PSD file and then update those categories and placements in CH. If you're familiar with triggers in CH, the grouping basically is just like that!

[Damien Mustaphi]

Awesome! Yes, I'm familiar with the triggers and grouping.

Thank you so much for the response.

[jeffs12497695]

Hi,

I am new to Adobe Animator... and very interested in the new Puppet Maker.

It seems that I am unable to find the (Beta) listings in Adobe Creative Cloud. I believe I have paid for full access to all apps.

I am excited to work with the new Puppet Maker.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I love Adobe Character Animator!

[Jeff Almasol]

Hi,

The "Beta apps" category appears only in the Creative Cloud desktop app; it doesn't appear in the web interface.
See the left sidebar -- it should be just after "Acrobat and PDF". Are you able to see it?

[danh47988479]

Is there an easy way to turn the characters so that they're facing the other way (right instead of left)?  I can do "flip canvas" in the photoshop file, but then the replays get messed up in Character Animator.

[oksamurai]

Best way is one you've generated your puppet, go to the Transform behavior and change the Scale X property.

[william5E2E]

thanks for the awesome new upgrades and features guys. In other hand wanted to ask if will soon be ready a feature to create our .maker files with our own custom characters and props designs that fit to our project needs, that would be a really valuable feature for the community. 

[oksamurai]

Yes. See the "Can I Make My Own Puppet Maker Templates?" section of https://www.adobe.com/go/ch_puppetmaker - we are hard at work on this!

[william5E2E]

Cool, thanks a lot @oksamurai really appreciate it, just filled the form

[ReeveHunter]

Hey there! I played with the beta version the other day. What a great feature!

Here are a couple of small suggestions for the randomize feature:

1. Lock certain character properties/options before randomizing.
2. Randomize a particular feature (like just the hair). Maybe this could be implemented with a right-click context menu or a keyboard shortcut when hovering over a particular options panel.

[CoSA_DaveS]

Thanks for your request. Not exactly what you're looking for, but we are adding a new feature available to the creators of the .maker file which allows them to make some random choices more likely than others. For example, if the maker file has an option for mustache/beard/none, the creator of the file can specify that the "none" option should happen more often than just a third of the time when clicking Randomize.

[defaultskntddv1k5w2]

It would be great if we could import Autodesk Maya puppets and objects into Adobe Character Animator. There are some great designs 3rd party artists have created for Maya. But currently none of them can be used in Character Animator. Any plans to include such capability?

[oksamurai]

I think I responded to you on YouTube as well, but just in case: Anything you can paste into a PSD file can be a character, so people have made characters in 3D programs and flattened them into PSD characters (see https://youtu.be/7pgm_u4VkQk?t=263). There are no current plans for a full 3D workflow, but never say never!

[victord17805074]

If there was an easy way to replace the custom characters with your own artwork in character animate software itself. So you wont have to go through the tedious process of editing the ai or psd files which often gets broken. 

[Raouf22214175r7ot]

This is great, but I have a question, why didn't you include it in the official version of Ch 2022?

[oksamurai]

It wasn't ready yet! But it will be very, very soon — stay tuned!

[Paul250138463osu]

Hi. I've just installed the starter and beta version of  CA, together with the Media Encoder, and I'm disappointed to see that the pupper maker option is greyed out. Is there some reason for this? Could it be that my system is not powerful enough, or some other reason? Thanks.

[oksamurai]

Puppet Maker is only available in "Pro" mode now, and you're probably in "Starter" - just switch to Pro in the upper right corner and you should be all set.