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

Adding modifiers for mouse control

Modifiers are essentially controls or behaviors we can add to the rig. This can involve the ability to drag that part of the rig, anchor it to the ground, dangle things, and much more.

Let’s move over to the Record tab for a moment. If your scene is blank and you don’t see the rig, see the following:

  1. Drag and drop the CHAZ puppet from the Project panel into the middle of the screen.
  2. Chaz should appear on the Scene panel. He will probably be larger than the scene dimensions. If this is the case, let’s shrink him down.
    1. Click once on CHAZ on the Timeline panel (located at the bottom of the screen).
    2. On the right-hand side, see Properties and change Scale to 30%.

You should now be able to see Chaz fully.

As it stands, right now, the rig doesn’t react in any way when we click or drag around on the canvas. The only other thing that may react is the character’s face if you have your camera and microphone...