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

Implementing head turns

With a rig set up properly, it can react to the actor turning their head on camera, and as with most behaviors, it can be modified and controlled using a keyboard and mouse if desired. All it takes is setting the proper tags, duplicating layers, and adjusting some values.

Tagging the head phases

As you have seen, our Chaz rig comes with various layers to create a head turn. The three main poses are left ¾, left profile, and front. We went through and refined the rig structure. Now, we just need to tell Character Animator how to react.

Let’s tag the phases and set up the behavior:

  1. On the Rig tab, click on the Heads layer.
  2. On the bottom right should be the Behavior panel. Click on the + icon and choose Head & Body Turner from the list. This will tell Character Animator that this is where the sub-groups are for the head phases:
Figure 8.13: The Head & Body Turner behavior enables us to animate head turns

Figure 8.13: The Head & Body Turner behavior enables us to animate...