Character Animator CC is no longer in beta!

I’m excited to announce that Character Animator CC is graduating from beta to being a full-fledged CC app. Character Animator has grown up fast, and the upcoming release is full of incredible new features that make bringing your characters to life faster, easier and more fun.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5GhgsiaYiJw?feature=oembed

Feature highlights

New Triggers panel

Show, hide, swap, or cycle through puppet layers with your keyboard or MIDI device. The new Triggers panel gives you a central place to manage all your puppet’s triggers. Toggle layers on and off, or create swap sets to show one group of layers at a time, such as for different hand gestures. Triggers can even reference layers in different groups.

New Controls panel

The new Controls panel displays triggers and puppet properties as buttons and sliders, and automatically generates button designs based on your artwork. Whether you’re performing live or recording for later, the customizable visual interface makes it easy to see everything your character is capable of. The layout is stored with the puppet so you can share trigger layouts with other people.

Eyebrow and eye animation improvements

Added eyebrow rotation and movement gives you more expressive characters, from worried or angry to surprised. A new snap eye gaze feature gives you more control of pupil movement.

Pose-to-pose animation

The new pose-to-pose option smooths out the transitions between your character’s poses for a hand-animated look. Control the amount of smoothing and how long to hold each pose to better match your performance to your puppet’s appearance.

New behaviours: Physics, Layer Picker, and Fader

A new Physics behaviour includes Collision, which enables your puppet to run into and bounce against environmental elements or another puppet. Trigger a specific layer in a puppet or group with Layer Picker. Fader lets you hide or show specific parts of your puppet.

Better audio

Waveform displays give you a visual method for aligning audio, plus Direct Link enables roundtrip support with Adobe Audition.

Better lip sync accuracy

Mouth shapes match more accurately to corresponding sounds with the new lip-sync algorithm. Lip sync (including edits) created in Character Animator can be copied and pasted into After Effects.

Rigging and UI enhancements

Rigging a puppet with independent parts is now more streamlined with automatic attachment of these independent groups to their parents (e.g., arms, legs, or other parts that overlap a torso or other part of a character). For newly imported artwork, position the group’s origin to where you expect it to attach–no more manual stapling or extra staple handles. New visualisations in the Puppet panel show how independent groups attach to their parent group’s mesh, which now includes a yellow outline to indicates the selected layer in the Puppet panel. A clipping mask lets you use the content of a layer to mask the layers above it. Use multiple layers in a clipping mask with successive layers.

Control surface support

Control your puppet with a MIDI device.

And More…

About Adobe

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com/uk.