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

Tagging the body layers

Like the head and mouth, we need to tag the body properly. Tagging the body parts works a little differently – we will need to add puppet handles and then tag them so the software knows how to react.

A puppet handle is essentially a control point we put on the rig, which can behave in various ways. Right now, we need to decide which parts of the rig need handles. Luckily, the Tags diagram makes it easy to keep track of which points go where on a character. Let’s get going:

  1. Collapse the main Heads group.
  2. Expand the Body group so we can see all the body layers:
Figure 4.31: The body layers

Figure 4.31: The body layers

  1. Start by clicking on the F Leg group.
  2. Click on the Handle tool located at the bottom of the screen (L on the keyboard):
Figure 4.32: The circle with the dot in the middle is the Handle tool

Figure 4.32: The circle with the dot in the middle is the Handle tool

  1. Add two handles to the leg: one for the knee and one for the ankle. These handles...