Create an animated avatar today with Adobe Character Animator

Getting started with Adobe Character Animator has never been easier. Animation in Character Animator begins with a character, and with Puppet Maker you can customize an animated character to use in your own creations, then animate with your webcam, mic, and the power of Adobe Sensei. Puppet Maker allows everyone to create their own custom characters with just a few clicks. Select a style, pick features like skin color and clothing, and generate a final optimized puppet for animating.

Puppet Maker ships with 12 styles, and has nine additional styles on the Puppet Maker site - meaning there are more than a billion unique puppet combinations. We are regularly releasing new styles, and this month we happily introduce Lacy and Doppel. Brimming with customization options, the Lacy and Doppel styles can help you get started creating your animated self or a whole team of unique characters.

Back to the classics with Lacy

The clay style Lacy template was created by Dovid Taub: writer, illustrator, puppeteer, and video editor, as well as the founder and creative director at Shmideo. Taub explains that in 2016 he was working on video narration for a children's ballet recital of the Nutcracker Suite and the client wanted it to be in the style of classic, claymation holiday specials, “I said, ‘Sure!  I can do 10 minutes of animation on a very low budget in a week!’ And then I had to figure out how.”

Taub explains, “I had an inkling that Character Animator would be my secret weapon, but I hadn’t seen many examples of that style in Character, so I had to experiment and see what worked. Ever since I started exploring this style, I’ve wanted to create a whole world’s worth of stop-motion style puppets for Character Animator, but the process is very involved and I’m kind of lazy so I left that idea on the shelf.”

Fortunately, this paid off because, as Taub describes, “Once Puppet Maker was released it opened up so many possibilities for unique character creation that would have been so much more time consuming or even impossible before. One of my favorite things to do with Puppet Maker is to just sit there and hit the “randomize” button over and over again. Besides for the delightfulness of seeing an infinite array of unique characters, I love how it breaks my brain’s expectations of what types of features, hairstyles or clothes ‘go together’.”

Adding another doppelganger with Doppel

Scientists say that statistically, everyone has around six doppelgangers. That's six other people with a face that looks nearly identical to yours, and with Character Animator's new Doppel style, make that seven.

Doppel 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.

Both Lacy and Doppel have a wide variety of customizable options. These include clothing, hair, head coverings, eye shapes, nose shapes, lots of hand movements, and more. Along with Lacy and Doppel you can also find seven other character styles on the Puppet Maker page. There are also anime and fantasy style puppets by Nikki Goldberg, Yuri Pineda, and DeMarco Crews.

Have you always wanted to animate? Add the flair of animation and take your content to a new level. Now is the time to get started. Make your own avatar puppet using the Lacy or Doppel styles, and create an animated explainer video or a social media post.

Resources

• Learn about Puppet Maker here.
• New! Transcript-based Lip Sync.
• Get inspired by the latest Community Spotlight.
• Learn more about using Character Animator here.