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 the Stream workspace

The Stream workspace doesn’t offer much other than a clean area to help you display and animate a character with a streaming application. You will find no timeline, just any controls and behaviors you need to access to animate. The idea here is to take a complete puppet, point your streaming app to Character Animator, set up your visuals in the streaming app, and then perform them.

The Stream workspace offers a couple of options you will find near the bottom right of the Scene window:

Figure 13.40: The Stream options are limited but useful

Figure 13.40: The Stream options are limited but useful

Let’s go over these icons from left to right:

  • The first icon, Refresh, will reload your scene and rig in the event you’re having issues with changes appearing in the Stream workspace.
  • The Show Mesh icon will display the mesh of the puppet. This could be useful for testing.
  • The Stream Live option is useful if you have multiple monitors. By ticking the...