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

Organizing with normal and independent groups

While we can organize and tag to an extent in Character Animator, it’s best to do as much work as possible in Photoshop. With that said, we are going to restructure and further refine the layer names. Independent groups are shown with a + symbol before the group name. These groups or layers will act differently in Character Animator, staying separate or independent from the influence of other layers. We will learn more about this in an upcoming chapter.

Creating main groups

To begin, it’s best to have your character in its own group, along with the Head and Body groups housing all the layers underneath. We currently have this setup, which is a good start:

Figure 3.32: Eyes Open layers renamed properly

Figure 3.32: Eyes Open layers renamed properly

We will group and label most head items in a specific way:

  1. Inside the Heads group, expand the first ¾ Head group.
  2. Inside this group, we’re going to add the following...