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

Using PNG sequences for external animations

While Character Animator is great for quick character animation, there may be some tasks best left to other apps. In these cases, we have choices of how to implement external animations. These PNG sequences can be implemented during editing once you export them from Character Animator, or you can import sequences to Character Animator and integrate them into the set. In this chapter, we will do the latter.

Importing PNGs for the sequence

Like importing PSDs or other files, we will import the sequence of images onto our Project panel. This animation comprises 60 individual images and we can link behavior to allow a cycle effect.

To import the image sequence, take the following steps:

  1. Make sure you’re on the Rig tab.
  2. Double-click a blank area on the Project panel to bring up the import prompt.
  3. Browse to the AudienceAnimation folder, which is in the book project files.
Figure 11.1: You will find 60 images inside the AudienceAnimation folder

Figure 11...