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

Creating swap sets for hands

Triggers are binary, allowing for the layer assigned to be turned on or off. Swap sets allow us to switch or swap out different layers as we record. For this book’s project, we will set up a swap set to change our hand poses.

Since we grouped our hands when laying out the rig in Photoshop, we can set this up pretty easily:

  1. Make sure you’re on the Rig tab.
  2. Locate F Hands, found under F Arm.
  3. Right-click on F Hands and choose Create Swap Set.
Figure 7.13: Choosing Create Swap Set will automatically make the group layers swappable

Figure 7.13: Choosing Create Swap Set will automatically make the group layers swappable

The Triggers panel should now show F Hands with the three hand poses we organized below it.

Figure 7.14: A swap set lays out each asset in the group, allowing you to customize your keys

Figure 7.14: A swap set lays out each asset in the group, allowing you to customize your keys

Don’t worry – the cup trigger is still present. We can access it again by clicking the coffee cup.png layer from the list. But for now, we...