Improved puppet rigging experience
Get animating faster than ever with better puppet rigging, making it easier to apply behaviors, search through many layered puppet rigs, and tag puppets more quickly within your established workflows.
New jaw movement with Lip Sync and improved Nutcracker Jaw
Now a character’s jaw can automatically move in conjunction with their lip-synched, editable mouth visemes, for additional impact. You can also compute Nutcracker Jaw movement from scene audio.
- Find your behaviors quickly with a new search filter that locates specific layers based on name or behavior. Search for layers by name of behavior that’s applied.
- With this release of Character Animator, wrap independence, behaviors, and handles do not require a group in a puppet.
- The newly improved Visual Tags layout lets you apply tags in context, like eye tags for eyes, mouth tags for mouths, etc. Tags are also ordered by appearence.
- Switch left and right tags with new option to “Swap Left & Right Tags,” for example, the Left Shoulder tag was applied where the Right Shoulder tag should be -- or vice versa.
- You can cut and copy handles from one layer of a puppet and paste them in the exact same location, relative to the entire puppet, in another layer. This is useful when you want to make sure two handles share the same location, such as a Magnet-tagged handle in a hand group needing to align with the same location in a coffee cup group, or if you need to move a handle to a different level in the puppet hierarchy.
To know more about these features, see Edit puppet structure and Prepare artwork.
With this update of Character Animator, the bottom of the character’s face can warp or move up and down in synch with the character’s speech. The Nutcracker Jaw behavior also has new parameters to control the extent of the movement.
For more information about the behavior, see Nutcracker Jaw: control the lower jaw with your face or voice.
This release intorduces two new puppets to the existing collection of in-app example puppets which you can use as-is or as a foundation for your own designs. For more puppets that you can use or build upon, see Charecter Animator Examples.
Powered by Sensei, experience better quality automatic lip-sync, reducing the impact of noisy audio. Additionaly, the Lip Sync behavior now can vertically offset a Jaw handle automatically based on the height of the current viseme, specifically the offset of the bottom edge of the viseme relative to the bottom edge of the Neutral mouth shape.
To know more, see Lip Sync: Control a puppet’s mouth with your voice.
Characterizer has been enhanced for faster user interaction and better looking results. Also, there are three new styles that you can apply to your character.
For information about Characterizer, see Create puppet using Characterizer.
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