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

Assembling the set

When you load Version 7, Alien_Guest_v2.psd will already be in your project panel, rigged and ready. But what about a background or set? Setting our characters on a white background may be a bit boring. Let’s import some images and assemble a set for our characters to interact in.

Importing the background assets

To start this process, we will need to import the background assets:

  1. Make sure you’re on the Rig tab.
  2. Double-click the Project panel.
  3. Browse your book files and choose the six background assets we listed in the Technical requirements section.
Figure 10.1: List of images that make up the scene

Figure 10.1: List of images that make up the scene

You may find the Project panel is becoming cluttered and hard to navigate. Let’s take a moment and organize it. Let’s create three groups, bg assets, rigs, and scenes, and group our files accordingly. You can use the following screenshot as a visual example:

Figure 10.2: The Project panel rearranged with groups
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