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

Linking Independent groups

By default, your rig will act as one piece when animating. The best example of this is the back hand being stuck to the back leg. Since we tagged none of the body layers as Independent, Character Animator thinks we want this all to act as one piece. The reason we don’t have the same issue with the front arm is because of the front hand is not touching the rig, unlike the back hand.

Luckily, we can easily assign new Independent layers without having to go back to Photoshop. From there, we will need to weld some pieces together to ensure the rig will properly animate.

Assigning layers as Independent

Let’s inspect how Character Animator is currently viewing the connection of our body layers. Go back to the Rig tab. Do you see the yellow outline surrounding the character? This is the boundary of the mesh. The mesh allows Character Animator to interpret the way the layers connect. Since we labeled no body parts as Independent, Character...