Feature summary | Adobe Character Animator | 2019 releases

Characterizer, powered by Adobe Sensei, generates a stylized Character Animator puppet in seconds by combining a webcam-captured image of the user and any piece of reference art. It’s now easier to immediately create a unique puppet. Characterizer comes with a variety of styles, from painting to drawing to sculpture, and you can even add your own. Adjust the amount of the stylization as well as other parameters to create a variety of looks.

For more information, see Characterizer.

Replays allow you to choose your best takes, like that one great eye roll or perfectly-timed fist bump, and create a trigger that you can use live or during your next recording. Improve the quality of your live performances by easily accessing your most frequently-used takes during a live stream. Save time creating your perfect takes, whether it’s simple facial expression or a signature high-five. Replays are also included when you export a puppet, letting you share recorded performances that others can trigger.

For more information, see Replays: Reusable and triggerable recordings.

Make your animations more lively with Magnets behavior. Magnets allow your puppet to throw, drop, and pick up items, like picking up a coffee mug on a desk or throwing a baseball. Simply drag your puppet’s hand to a cup, and it will automatically pick up the cup like a magnet.

For more information, see Magnets: Dynamic attachment of objects.

Physics now includes Squashiness. Add flexibility to your puppets and objects. Squashiness might be added to a squishy ball bouncing on the ground to make the motion less rigid. Squash and Stretch is used in many traditional-animated cartoons to add more liveliness to the characters.

Damping control lets you reduce the amount of sway while using lower stiffness settings that cause looser swaying motion.

For more information, see Dangle: Squash and Stretch deformation, Damping control.

With the newly added shoulder and hip tags, three-quarter view walks are now possible. Biped characters drawn in three-quarter perspective now produce more pleasing arm and leg motion when the new Left Shoulder, Right Shoulder, Left Hip, and Right Hip handle tags are used. Instead of swinging arms from the neck and legs from a single hip location, separate left and right shoulder and hip locations can improve the appearance of these swinging limbs.

For more information, see Walk: Make a character walk.

History Bookmarks let you access your history so you can experiment with new ideas without fear of losing your original or current work. Refer to the History Panel to see or return to previous versions. Use history bookmarks to remember a specific version of your project, so that you can experiment with different ideas at any point. Create these markers in a project’s history and recall them later to quickly restore another state of your project. Keep track of different variations of a project all within the same project. To create a new bookmark, for the current state of the project, either click the New History Bookmark button in the bottom-left corner of the History panel or choose File > New History Bookmark.

For more information, see Undo, redo, and history.

This release introduces the following improvements to the Start workspace:

• The updated Start workspace highlights in-application and online video tutorials. See the Start Here tutorial and get started with Character Animator.
• Start creating your character using Characterizer in one click.
• This release includes a number of new template puppets. These puppets are freely available. Click on the template and start animating. You can also modify these puppets using Photoshop or Illustrator.
• Easily access your recent projects from the tab on the left, and create and open projects in one click.

On newer versions of Windows (specifically Windows 10 Version 1703 and later), when Character Animator is running on a High DPI display – high resolution display with display scaling above 100% for text and applications – text and graphics in the user interface will be sharper. Also, the application now dynamically adapts to changes in DPI, including when moving windows and dialog boxes to different monitors of varying display scales, without needing to restart the application or log out and log back into Windows, more so on newer Windows 10 versions.