Physics between two separate objects:

There needs to be a feature under Physics where separate objects can SPECIFICALLY attach/detach/push/pull features. Ex: this would be great for strings being pulled or trigger on/off to detach whenever and go back to dangling as an example. Connecting two objects by certain points as marked in the rig panel (attach point pins) , where stretching or pulling strings/objects can be done in connection to other objects, all in relation to the weight of the objects themselves etc.

PLUS this should be a feature applicable between characters and objects to their limbs/hands/etc. Hope y'all read this!

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...

If I have a puppet rigged like OKSamurai's Yoga girl, and I want some draggers to be "hold in place" like the arms and feet, but I want the torso dragger to be "return to rest" then I would need a local Dragger Behavior for the independent leg layer.

But when I do that, if Ground detection is enabled, then the heel/dragger moves fine, but the toe remains pinned to the ground.

This works fine when there's only one global dragger behavior, but no matter where I put a second one, the toe information is lost.

Nesting local dragger behaviors in the arm layers works fine though, it's just the ground detection info that isn't passed through the second dragger behavior.

Is this fixable?

Thanks!

I had a very large source .PSD file that I learned Character Animator would have trouble keeping up with--after I had completed all my rigging. I tried to resize my source file but this broke all the rigging (makes sense since the size of the puppet changed). Unfortunately the only way for me to fix it was to resize the source .PSD and create a new puppet and rig all over again. Fortunately I was able to use the previous build as reference, but it would have been nice to have some kind of option to create a smaller file size while retaining the work I had done. (Yes, I know you can scale the puppet in size but that's not the same as actually reducing the file size of the source file.)

There are a lot of ways to bring your character "to life" in Character Animator, however there is one thing that a cartoon has that life doesn't: 100% consistency.

I have an idea about triggers having an RNG system to them such as different mouth shapes for the same sound to add variation or when I hit a trigger to make a pleased expression the expression has different variations that will randomly trigger to give the same emotion but have a slightly different look to give some imperfections/naturalness to the design (such as people don't make the EXACT same face whenever they are pleased, or look the EXACT same whenever they get mad.

Same idea as script/handwriting font writers when they make multiple iterations of the same letter to give the illusion that it is actually someone's handwriting.