Adobe Character Animator overview

Character Animator enables expressive, high-quality performance-based animation. It's so fast, it can even be used live. 

Character Animator allows you to import artwork from Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, and breathe life into them. You do so by first capturing your performance using a camera, microphone, keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. While you are performing, Character Animator captures your facial expressions.

For more information about the latest release, see What's new in Adobe Character Animator.

Character Animator is for anyone who wants to create a character and make it come alive! It helps you to rig a character, create puppets by modifying built-in character templates, by importing your Photoshop and Illustrator characters, or by using new Sensei-powered Characterizer. Character Animator is for everyone from the aspiring or professional animator, video content creator, educators, gamers, graphic designers, or illustrators who work in the media and entertainment industry and require fast-turn animation as a part of their overall workflow. This tool also allows you to host live interaction between characters and fans. 

You can install Adobe Character Animator as a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud all apps plan. For more details, see Creative Cloud Plans & Pricing. To see the basic system requirements to run the application, see System requirements | Character Animator.

A Character Animator project is a collection of puppets, scenes, and supporting items (for example, artwork and audio files). You can create separate projects to organize related work, such as for an episode of a cartoon or for a specific client. Each project is stored on disk as a separate folder.

For more information, see Projects.

There are different ways in which you can create your first character. You can choose to use a template puppet, create a new character using Characterizer, or by creating your own puppet.

You can choose to use the templates available from the Character Animator Start workspace. Choose a template puppet from the Start workspace, and start animating it. The puppet automatically opens in Photoshop/ Illustrator where you can edit it. Your changes automatically sync with Character Animator.

Use Characterizer to easily create a custom puppet based on your facial expressions or reference art. Click on Open Characterizer in the Start workspace to get started. For more information, see Create puppet using Characterizer.

You can also create a puppet with your own art by importing a multi-layered Photoshop or Illustrator file. Character Animator can import multi-layered Photoshop and Illustrator files representing the structural pieces (head, eyes, mouth shapes, and so forth) of a character. The selected file is imported and a puppet appears in the Rig panel. The structure in the Photoshop or Illustrator document determines the structure of the puppet. Note that it is very important that the puppet is made according to the standards required for rigging it. Watch this tutorial for more information.

For more information, see Prepare artwork, and Create Puppets from artwork, Rigging your puppet and Assemble puppets into scenes.

Place your face at a comfortable distance from the webcam. Make a neutral facial expression, then click Set Rest Pose. Red tracking dots appear on your face. Try moving and rotating your head from side to side, making different facial features, blinking, and talking. Use your mouse to drag near the character’s arms.

For more information, see Recording and playback.

A puppet has behaviors, capabilities that let you control its movement, deformation, appearance, and other attributes. Behaviors allow you to add expressive control to your puppets. Some behaviors use external controls, such as the webcam or audio or mouse input.

Face tracking is an example of a behavior, and so is the walk. Adjust behavior parameters to modify and rehearse how the puppet moves, appears, and reacts. Most behaviors have parameters that let you customize the results.

For more information, see Control puppets using behaviors.

After you have recorded the scene, using Dynamic Link, you can open a scene directly in After Effects or Premiere Pro and keep a live connection to the original scene in Character Animator. Changes to the scene in Character Animator are automatically reflected when switching back to After Effects or Premiere Pro.

You can export directly to  Adobe Media Encoder, or to a PNG sequence and WAV file. The exported movie file can be played back immediately.

For more information, see Export.

You can also broadcast a scene live to external devices or applications.

For more information about streaming and setting up your system for streaming, see that Stream a scene live.

• For video tutorials, see Adobe Character Animator tutorials.
• You can build your characters and bring them to life using Character Animator. For more information, see Bring your 2D characters to life.
• Find answers to your questions in the Character Animator forum.
• Okay Saurai is a YouTube channel with a collection of tutorials. Click here to visit the channel.