Character Animator

Character Animation Project

OVERVIEW

Adobe Character Animator CC is a character animation application that allows you to bring expressive characters to life using your own artwork. Character Animator allows you to import artwork from Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, and breathe life into them. You can do so by first capturing your performance using a camera, microphone, keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. While you’re performing, Character Animator tracks your facial expressions, synchronizes mouth movements to your speech, and provides complete control over all aspects of a character’s movement.

Your will be developing a character (puppet) based on your looks or a fictitious character.  You will use that puppet to tell a short story that is 15-30 seconds.  The story is your choice. Follow the requirements below to complete the story and animation.

REQUIREMENTS:

• The puppet must have a head with facial expressions (Mouths, eyebrows, eyes)
• The puppet must have body with limbs that will move.
• The puppet is animated into a scene that depicts your story.
• The character walks through the scene at least once using the walk cycle
• The puppet is between the foreground and background layers
• The puppet has audio (talks)
• The puppet has specific triggers
• The puppet has behaviors
• The project is saved and rendered in the network drive as Puppet_(YourInitals)

OBJECTIVES

• Create a character in Photoshop or Illustrator
• Demonstrate how to rig an animated character
• Demonstrate how use character expressions
• Create a walk cycle for a character

INSTRUCTIONS

1. WATCH TRAINING VIDEOS

Lynda.com Course: After Effects Guru: Character Animator

2. CREATE CHARACTER

Create your own character in either Photoshop or Illustrator. One of the best ways to get familiar with Character Animator is to use the templates available from the Start workspace. These templates are great to help understand how a puppet is built. Character Animator can import layered Photoshop and Illustrator files showing the puppet structure and pieces (head, eyes, mouth, etc.).

The hierarchy of the sample Photoshop and Illustrator files are important; it sets up the rigging for your character in Character Animator. To understand how to name and structure a file, you can open a provided template and use it as is, or modify it to suit your own character style and inspiration.

3. CREATE THE SCENE

In Photoshop or Illustrator Create a scene for your character to be in. Use the dimensions of 1920px x 1080px. It should include:

• A background scene (One File)
• A foreground scene (Another File)

4. IMPORT FILES

Import the character, background, and foreground imagery into Character Animator.  Import all elements to a new scene.

5. CONTROL CHARACTER WITH WEBCAM AND MOUSE

When you add a puppet to a scene in Character Animator, you enable performance capture animation actions that let you control a puppet’s movement, appearance, and expressions. These behaviors react to your external controls via a webcam, audio, and/or mouse inputs. It is these behaviors that allow for expressive, dynamic control of previously static artwork. Setting up control of your puppet is very easy. Simply look in the center of the Scene panel, place your face at a comfortable distance from the webcam (but big enough within the circle shown in the Camera & Microphone panel), make a neutral facial expression, then click Set Rest Pose button. Red tracking dots appear on your face. Try moving and rotating your head from side to side, making different facial features, blinking, and talking. That’s it! You have activated the performance capture animation features of Character Animator.

6. ADJUST BEHAVIOR OF THE PUPPET

Puppets have a wide range of variable expressions and behaviors. Face tracking is an example of a behavior, and so is the automatic wiggling of artwork pieces like hair or limbs. You can fine-tune and adjust these behavior to be more or less responsive to how the puppet moves, appears, and reacts to you. New puppets automatically get the following behaviors: Dangle, Dragger, Eye Gaze, Face, Keyboard Triggers, Lip Sync, and Transform. You can add and remove behaviors as needed. Most behaviors have settings that let you customize the results. The puppet settings appear in the Properties panel, with slightly different controls depending if you are in the Rig workspace, or the Record or Stream workspaces.

7. RECORD AND REFINE YOUR PERFORMANCE

Performance capture animation of a scene’s puppets is done during recording. Each recording of a scene is called a take, and multiple takes can be edited together to create a final, polished project. A scene is the combination of its puppets that you can control live, plus takes, and any other background, musical, sound effects or assets used in a production. Use the Record workspace to build, rehearse, record, and refine your puppet scenes.

8. EXPORT THE RECORDED SCENE

After you have recorded the scene the way you want, you can open your Character Animator file in Adobe After Effects which will then allow you to render the animation. Save the file as Puppet_(YourInitals).

RESOURCES

Free Puppets:

EXAMPLES

ASSESSMENT

You will be graded according to the following criteria to earn a total of 50 points:

• Project turned on time (5 pts)
• All files set up and saved in correct format (5 pts)
• A well developed character with all body and facial components (5 pts)
• There is a well developed scene (5 pts)
• There is a well developed and engaging story (5 pts)
• The character has correct facial behaviors: smile, eyebrows, blink, etc.. (5 pts)
• The character walks with an effective walk cycle behavior – no distortion (5 Pts)
• The character has triggers that are used effectively (5 Pts)
• Audio enhances the story and is clear and understandable (5 Pts)
• Student always uses classroom project time well. Conversations are primarily focused on the project and things needed to get the work done and are held in a manner that typically does not disrupt others. (5 pts)