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.

At present, Character Animator (v3.4) supports Swap Sets that enable users to select a single layer to be visible within a layer group.

For example, say you want to create multiple pre-drawn facial expressions for your puppet, "Normal" and "Sad". In each expression, you want to be able to change the eyebrows, eyelids and entire mouth swap set.

How would a user achieve this with a simple puppet structure like the following?

+Head
    +Eyebrow Left
    +Eyebrow Right
    Eye Left
        Eyelids Left
        +Pupil Left
        Eyeball Left
    Eye Right
        Eyelids Right
        +Pupil Right
        Eyeball Right
    Nose
    Mouth
        Neutral
        Smile
        Surprised
        M
        ... etc
    Face

A user would need to create individual Swap Sets for each facial element that needs to change, as follows:

+Head
    +Eyebrow Left
        Eyebrow Left Normal
        Eyebrow Left Sad
    +Eyebrow Right
        Eyebrow Right Normal
        Eyebrow Right Sad
    Eye Left
        Eyelids Left
            Eyelids Left Normal
            Eyelids Left Sad
        +Pupil Left
        Eyeball Left
    Eye Right
        Eyelids Right
            Eyelids Right Normal
            Eyelids Right Sad
        +Pupil Right
        Eyeball Right
    Nose
    Mouth
        Mouth Swap Set Normal
            Neutral Normal
            Smile Normal
            Surprised Normal
            M Normal
            ... etc
        Mouth Swap Set Sad
            Neutral Sad
            Smile Sad
            Surprised Sad
            M Sad
            ... etc
    Face

This example shows only 2 facial expressions, but imagine if you wanted a large range of emotional expression. Then add in support for head turns -- the puppet would get overly complex very quickly.

I am currently using this method on a production. For more detailed explanation, you can view my video tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVwz4vpz6o

A better way to do this would be to support the concept of "Recursive" Swap Sets.

These would switch layers throughout an entire layer group tree, not just directly below a single layer group.

This could be used to simplify the above scenario. The user could create a structure as follows:

+Head
    Expression Normal
        +Eyebrow Left
        +Eyebrow Right
        Eye Left
            Eyelids Left
            +Pupil Left
            Eyeball Left
        Eye Right
            Eyelids Right
            +Pupil Right
            Eyeball Right
        Nose
        Mouth
            Neutral
            Smile
            Surpised
            M
            ... etc
        Face
    Expression Sad
        +Eyebrow Left
        +Eyebrow Right
        Eye Left
            Eyelids Left
        Eye Right
            Eyelids Right
        Mouth
            Neutral
            Smile
            Surprised
            M
            ... etc

Note that the "Expression Sad" layer group contains several layer group names that exactly match the structure in the "Expression Normal" layer group, but contains only the layers that will alter to create the "Sad" facial expression.

The "+Head" layer group would then be set as a "Recursive Swap Set" and "Expression Normal" set as Default.

When "Expression Sad" is triggered, Character Animator would recursively search through the entire "Expression Sad" layer group tree to replace layers or groups that have matching names with the target layer or group.

After the operation, the end state of the puppet, conceptually, would be:

+Head
    Expression Current
        +Eyebrow Left Sad
        +Eyebrow Right Sad
        Eye Left
            Eyelids Left Sad
            +Pupil Left
            Eyeball Left
        Eye Right
            Eyelids Right Sad
            +Pupil Right
            Eyeball Right
        Nose
        Mouth
            Neutral Sad
            Smile Sad
            Surpised Sad
            M Sad
            ... etc
        Face

Once the Trigger ends, the puppet would conceptually return to its Default state, which is "Expression Normal".

This would give users a much more convenient way to swap groups of layers for a variety of complex effects.