Firsts! - Adobe Character Animator

 Firsts! - Adobe Character Animator

Introduction

The next medium I wanted to explore in my 'Firsts!' series is a much more recent development than my previous post on rotoscoping. Digital, live, rigged character animation is becoming extremely popular in many forms of media across the world, from the rise of the 'Virtual Youtuber' in the East and West, to dynamic face filters on social media applications such as snapchat.

Rather than hand crafting animations frame by frame, or creating 2D/3D character rigs to then animate movement using interpolation and rendering techniques, live rigging and character performance is becoming more and more popular.

For a bit more of an explanation, live character animation entails creating a 2D or 3D rig, much in the same way you would when animating in a software such as After Effects or Maya. However, rather than manually animating movement, these rigs are 'plugged in' to animation/gaming software such as live 2D, Facerig, VRoid studio, or VRChat, to create animation which is contextual to user's facial and body movements.

In other words, live character animation results in the ability to be able to act as a character, well, live, for the purposes of video production or social platforms and gaming.

The rise of this technology has created many subcultures that I previously mentioned, such as Vtubers, an offshoot of Youtube personalities that brand themselves act as created characters rather than themselves, and games such as VRChat, which allow players to interact with other players as any character they choose.

Given the explanation, you'd be forgiven for thinking that creating live character animation is an extremely complex process, which requires 10 years in Maya and 10 more in After Effects, but in fact, one of the latest additions to the Adobe Suite, Adobe Character Animator, is making the dream of becoming your favourite cartoon character or a cartoon version of yourself, very very accessible!

Creating Your Rig

As I previously mentioned, creating a rig in Adobe Character Animator (Adobe Ch) isn't as complex as you'd think in terms of the concept, but still requires quite a few steps to get it up and running.

The first step you're gonna want to make is creating a template that Adobe Ch can interface with and read your rig properly. This involves setting up either a Photoshop or an Illustrator file in a certain way, which can be done manually, but I personally used a template which I downloaded from this link to 'Okay Samurai Puppets', which can be found at the bottom of the page.

Upon opening this file, you'll be presented with a blank 1000px x 1000px photoshop file with grouped layers on the right hand side, each of which refer to specific body parts of the rig you're going to create ( Note - this can also be done in Adobe Illustrator if you have more affinity or preference in using that software):

As you might be able to guess, each of these body parts, such as 'right eyeball', 'left pupil', 'nose', refer to the layer that specific body part needs to be drawn on in order for Adobe Ch to properly capture your character and translate your facial movements.

There are also mouth sounds such as 'Ah' 'M' and 'F' which need to be inputted so your speech can be interpreted by the character when you talk into a microphone, which is pretty sweet.

You really have free reign to create whatever kind of character you want here, from classic cartoon to anime to your own distinct style, have fun and create whatever forward facing character illustration you want, just make sure that each part of the illustration is on the correct layer or else it will not work when we import the file!

This is the rig that I created for my first try, which is a cartoony replication of myself! As I previously said, all of the elements that make up this rig have been drawn on their respective layer, the right eyebrow is drawn on the 'right eyebrow layer', the nose is drawn on the 'nose layer', etc (Important note: Some layers have a '+' in their name, do not remove this or change the name of the layers from what they originally are, or else Adobe Ch will not read them properly.

Since all the layers are turned on here, you can see that certain things such as the 'blink' pose and all the various mouth movements are overlapping with one another, but this is ok! Once imported it will only respond to your facial movements and nothing more.

Importing Your Rig Into Adobe Character Animator

Now the rig is complete, you can import that PSD or Ai file directly into Adobe Ch. To do this, simply load up the program, navigate to the 4 tabs at the top of the page, and select 'rig'. 

From this page, select file > import > and then select the PSD or Ai file you want to use. This will add the rig to the project window on the left, which you can then double click to open your rig, presenting you with this screen:

Here we can see all the layers have been imported correctly and are being registered by the software. By click on each individual layer in the puppet tab, you can see that the software recognises each part of the body.

From here, we can then move to the 'record' tab at the top of the page to move to the recording section, which we can then see our character in action using our webcam and microphone.

Your puppet will still be in the project window from before, so drag it into the timeline at the bottom to make it appear. From here you'll need to set a rest pose so that your rig can track your movements correctly, which just means sitting centrally in the frame and making a neutral expression.

If the rig is appropriately responding to your movements and speech, you've made a working 2D rig!! From here you can record footage with transparent backgrounds to use in videos, or to stream live with. The following video is a clip of the final rig working inside Character Animator:

Final Thoughts

I expected to enjoy getting into this world since it allows me to carry over my usual art style into a new medium, but I was apprehensive since I was expecting this to be a much more complicated ordeal than it turned out to be. Creating live rigs is actually a really rewarding a relatively quick experience that above all of it's new practical applications is just FUN to play with and mess around with.

Adobe Character Animator is one many 2D and 3D live rigging softwares that are being quite widely used now, and I definitely want to experiment with these since I hear their user experience is more intuitive and simple than one would expect.

Live Character Animation is absolutely 100% something I'm going to continue to keep my eye on and experiment in other software's, since I only see the demand for live rigs increasing in time, and as I previously said, it's super duper fun!