Creep it real. New free example puppets for Character Animator

Happy Halloween! Or as brother-sister duo Jet & Ash call it, amateur night. They live the dark and spooky life year-round, often spending nights in the cemetery penning poems of ennui and despair that even Edgar Allan Poe would find depressing. By day, they front the death metal band Ghost Paper Scissors, now playing at an abandoned treehouse near you. Download the puppet just in time for Halloween.

The Jet & Ash puppet was created by Emily Watts. She is a self-taught animator and illustrator, and currently performs the live animation of robot host, Nicky, on Nickelodeon’s cartoon game show, “Tooned In”. Before that, she served as the assistant director of animation for Your Daily Horoscope on Quibi, and created a children’s series on emotional literacy for Sesame Studios. Emily got her start in animation by developing her own animated web series, “The Weather Girls”, learning Adobe Character Animator through binge-watching Dave Werner’s “Okay Samurai” videos.

With cool goth clothes, a bat-shaped bow, a dangly skull earring, and jet blue and black hair use Dangle so that the character parts can bounce, sway, and slide realistically alongside other fun triggers. Which one is Jet? Which one is Ash? You decide -this puppet could be either one. Use your arrow keys to control the Walk behavior and get this puppet walking back and forth across the screen. Limb IK and Dragger help you control the arms.

New puppets in Body Tracker

In addition to the new Jet puppet, there are also two new puppets enabled with Body Tracker (in public Beta): Ruby and Nia. Live-perform 2D character animation using your body. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Body Tracker automatically detects human body movement using a web cam and applies it to your character in real time to create animation. For example, you can track your arms, torso, and legs automatically. The Ruby and Nia puppets utilize face tracking as well as Body Tracking for arms and torso. Download Nia and Ruby plus other puppets perfect for trying Body Tracker.

Puppet Maker in public Beta

This Halloween is nothing but treats! Puppet Maker is also in public Beta, allowing you to customize an animated character and get a unique puppet to use in your own creations. Puppet Maker lets you select a style, pick features like skin color and clothing, and generate a final optimized puppet. There are 10 available styles in Puppet Maker, and Okay Samurai has created a new style called Puppetbot, which is a robot with customizable head, arms, torso, legs, and metal color. Press the ‘On button’ trigger to activate special actions like a flamethrower or spinning buzzsaw. Check out Puppet Maker and the Puppetbot style.

From the Character Animator team to you, have a spook-tacular and fang-tastic Halloween!

Keep calm, trick or treat, and animate on.

Resources:

• More example puppets are here.
• More fun free puppets at Okay Samurai’s page.
• Want to learn more about using Character Animator? Here you go!