Book Image

Real-Time Animation with Adobe Character Animator

By : Chad Troftgruben
Book Image

Real-Time Animation with Adobe Character Animator

By: Chad Troftgruben

Overview of this book

Adobe Character Animator is a power app for non-animators that provides easy rigging and easy-to- understand tools that enable you to create entertainment or business videos in no time. This guide to Character Animator gives you a comprehensive overview of the app, helping you learn the entire process—from importing a character designed in Adobe Photoshop to animating a sequence. Complete with background art, multiple character rigs and Character Animator project files, this book will show you how to animate a scene in Character Animator from start to finish. Starting with a character PSD from another artist, you’ll organize and condense the file to prepare it for rigging and animation. From there, you’ll systematically rig the character while exploring advanced behaviors and triggers to animate a complex scene that takes advantage of the app’s best features. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create appealing animations in Character Animator for any purpose.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Preparing Character Art for Rigging
5
Part 2: Rigging Character Art for Animation
11
Part 3: Animating and Refining Your Scene

Animating breathing and jaw animations

While Character Animator can lip-sync by switching mouth poses based on phonemes, we can enhance this effect even further by adding a Nutcrack Jaw behavior. This will allow the jaw to drop based on what the mouth is doing. As with the eyelids, this is an optional feature. We will also add a Breathing behavior for further exploration:

  1. Click on Mouths inside of 3/4th Head.
  2. Using the handle tool, click and add a handle below the mouth:
Figure 8.10: The new handle can be placed below the mouth

Figure 8.10: The new handle can be placed below the mouth

  1. On the Tags panel, click on the jaw icon to define the layer.
  2. At the bottom of the Tags panel is a plus sign next to Behaviors. Click on the plus sign and choose Nutcracker Jaw from the list:
Figure 8.11: Adding the Nutcracker Jaw behavior to the mouth will allow us to control the parameters when recording

Figure 8.11: Adding the Nutcracker Jaw behavior to the mouth will allow us to control the parameters when recording

  1. Next, click on the Body layer and add a handle in the middle...