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

Separating out the hair

Depending on the complexity of the scene and rig, you may find you want to animate the hair in its own layers, especially as we introduce more behaviors into the mix. This means we will need to go back to the rig and ensure the hair is isolated for the three head phases. To do this, see the following:

  1. In Photoshop, start at the top of the layer list. In this case, expand 3/4th Head and click Background.
  2. You can select the hair in a variety of different ways. The quickest may be to use the Magnetic Lasso Tool option (cycle to it using L on the keyboard):
Figure 3.44: Pressing L allows you to cycle through a variety of useful selection tools

Figure 3.44: Pressing L allows you to cycle through a variety of useful selection tools

  1. Click once and drag along the edge of the hair. The magnetic function should snap to the outline. If you need to add a point manually, simply left-click.
  2. Keep dragging until you’ve selected all the hair. If a point gets added by mistake, you can move a step backward...