Am I not familiar enough with Character Animator or what, but here's my problem:

I have a little experience in After Effects before. There is a thing called "parenting"

It means I can parent layer "b" to another layer "a", and hence everytime layer a is moved layer b will follow that layer a movement. However I cannot find such option in Character Animator. A layer can only parent to its own group, and cannot parent to another layer outside its group. For example say a hair in the back of the head group and body group.

It looks like this:

• Character/Puppet

-- Head group

-- Body group

-- Hair

Won't it be very helpful if we can parent the hair into the head group instead of the entire character?

That way the hair will move everytime the head moves?

And this can apply to arms and torso. I have puppets that consist of two set of arm groups. Namely the back and front arm group. The front arm group is used when the hands of the character needs to be in front of the face.

It looks like this:

• Character/Puppet

-- Front arm group

-- Head group

-- Back arm group

-- Body group

And this are only a scarce of cases. Many things can be achieved if we just have this option.

I have thought about the magnet option, but the problem with magnet is the layer needs to be independent to work effectively. Many times I can't make a layer independent for reasons.

Thanks for reading!
Hopefully you can understand what I am trying to deliver...

Hey guys, LOVE CA, but Im running into a problem.

I have a character with shoulder length hair. I want the hair to be on top of the shoulder, but I want the hand to be able to be on top of the hair.

Obviously, I cant have the upper arm be one group and the forearm be another and still have it do all that fancy IK etc.

OR CAN I? :)

Maybe you could make a special kind of shared layer, where a copy of the arm with the upper arm and shoulder was transparent was above the hair, and the original version was still below. If CA could calculate the mesh and still do the layering, thatd be really amazing.

Any thoughts?

Thank you!

I need to have more control over the parallax feature. As I've seen suggested multiple times here, the ultimate solution would be something like Joysticks and Sliders- the script for AE from aescripts.com. If that's not possible, I'd at least like control over X and Y strength. I really just want X movement, but there doesn't seem to be a way to control this.
I'd also like the option of being able to drag the parallax around with the mouse rather than having to turn my head. In practice, physically turning your head to the side is pretty hard if you need the character to stay there while you do other actions. Then you can't see what you're doing until you look straight again!

I am constantly fighting with the rigging UX so many things that should be just simple and easy, are difficult. Compounded with the fact that tags often overlay pins it can be very frustrating.

1) Ability to turn on/off the display of tags/behaviors so that I can see only handles or sticks.
I draw the rig in illustrator in a sepearate hierarchy so I can trace over it, manipulate it etc, and most importantly MIRROR it! much easier to do that way than manually trying to implement the sticks and handles in all the right places. I also color code handles that I want draggable, or ones that represent layer origins.

2) Ability to turn off everything except for sticks/handles that have a particular tag:
e.g. "draggable" (or "keyable" would be amazing) why? because in order to NAME the handles you have to walk through the outline. But if you select all layers, you can see all of the rigging. if you could then have it show ONLY the rigging you will need to be renaming it's much easier.

3) Ability to GHOST the puppet and emphasize the rig as well as PREVENT selecting anything but RIG!

4) This is critical... PLEASE give us box selection of the rigging!

5) Ability to filter layer display by layers that include specific behaviors

6) DISPLAY THE BEHAVIORS ON-SCREEN (maybe as part of the blue-layer box)

7) PLEASE fix sticks so they can be adjusted - just give us draggable end-points (current functionality - if stick is 1px too long, sorry redraw it then retag it, etc bad)

I don't have time to seperate these ideas into separate comments unless they will actually all be seen. I feel like these are all VERY basic features that would make rigging life much better (in addition to the many other requests for copy/paste/scale/mirroring which I'm still shocked aren't included)

To create my template visual rig in illustrator I was not able to see the behaviors. I also had to do in bits and pieces because zoomed out the tag labels cover sometimes much of the rigging or other tags/labels. so I had to zoom in. whereas all I wanted to do was a full view puppet, where I sequentially select the layers with handles. Then once I'd have my handles and sticks drawn I could then zoom in and transcribe the behaviors/tags.

[edit] a few more

8) How about ability to name handles from the timeline's outline!

9) ability to right click on a handle in the timeline and have it highlight the layer that the handle is on!

10) selection of handle() by clicking the word handle should SELECT the handle in the puppet window

11) a zoom-to-fit selected (mostly pertaining to handles/sticks, but could apply to layers as well.

I have 2 different swap sets of hand poses, namely the right hand and the left hand. Both swap groups has the same hand poses. However I would like to have it in one trigger swap set, instead of two. I can do this by creating swap set of, as example, the right hand, then manually move individual hand poses from the left hand group to the right hand swap set. It's a lot of work. Is it possible just to create for both hand groups its own swap set, then in the trigger panel, I drag either hand swap set to the other and have it automatically merged. So each hand pose trigger will have two trigger (right and hand) automatically.