How can we improve Character Animator?

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Improve rear hair (behind BODY) when +HEAD is warp independent

Currently you typically have a HEAD group in front of the BODY (so the chin is in front of the neck etc. You may also have front hair dangling in front of the body as well.

But it is hard to have +HEAD (an independent group) and rear hair (to be displayed behind the BODY). The front and rear hair should be both controlled by the head movement.

It would be nice to have a better way of having rear hair attached to head movements, but be behind the body.

I would suggest having a +REARHAIR group as a pattern, so depth of layers controls depth of display, but where you can “attach” the rear hear to the +HEAD group which is not a parent.

(A few approaches have been suggested in the forums, but none of them work properly. I only get rear hair to work when HEAD is not an independent group, so BODY and HEAD and REARHAIR are all part of the same group.)

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Alan Kent shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Ebenheizer Manullang commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

    I copy-pasted this to this feature request forum from:

    https://community.adobe.com/t5/character-animator/parenting-like-in-after-effects/m-p/11327179?page=1#M14191

  • Alan Kent commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Magnets connect parent to child so do not work. The concept is like after effects parenting - being discussed again in https://community.adobe.com/t5/character-animator/parenting-like-in-after-effects/m-p/11327179#M14191. Not sure what more information to provide. Basically there is no way to do rear hair dangling from a head if the head is independent. Numerous discussions in the forum, No solution has been found to date.

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