I read two other ideas similar, but I think it comes down to bounding boxes, ala Photoshop, with Cmd and Option changing the box points' functions (skew, etc) as in PS. Instead of clicking a layer as in PS, you click the element in the timeline, and its box appears. Including cameras.

Much more intuitive and fun to use. For CH, I think it would be more intuitive than in PS where you might have 100 layers.

Related to this, if cameras can't get a bounding box, allowing the mouse/touch controls to affect X & Y coordinates to establish keyframed shots instead of the dials would be nice for those of us not doing live performance.

Thanks.

I like using Dragger behaviors. Something intuitive about being able to move a limb exactly where I want it. Sure, I can get bad results if I overly rely on it, but it can help when layered atop other behaviors doing simple fixes.

But sometimes when I'm trying to pose the character just right, I get lost in where the dragger handles actually are and end up grabbing the wrong one. It's not like I can go back if I'm having to handle multiple handles at once, meaning I have to start all over.

It'd be nice if there was some option to be able to see where the dragger handles all are in Record mode. That way I know what specifically to grab to make a part move. Some keyboard shortcut I can hold down to show them temporarily, that will make them invisible when I let go, could be handy too.

I find it very frustrating when wanting to add more detail to arm motions for example that I can't see the previous position I'd recorded without un arming the puppet.

For example, if I want to create a simple wave motion and have set a basic position for the arm but then want to add some extra motion to it, I struggle to match the original position to then add the extra piece of motion.

The only way I can see the original position is to unarm the puppet - hold the position in my mind, arm the puppet, and try to match it with the extra piece of motion I want to add.

Is there no way that when working on a puppet, the dragger positions can remain visible without unarming the puppet?

This would really allow for finessing of dragger positions and consequently, the motion.

You know what would be cool? I'm using the body recorder for full body recordings, and it works pretty well. Well, aside from the glitches where the body decides to become a foot taller for a second or two or the head decides to stick to one spot while the rest of the body moves as expected. Well, it'd be cool to maybe have an option to smooth over parts of a body recording between a couple frames, or have it be like another recording where you could use the blend-in and blend-out sides. It would basically take the body data from the beginning of the range and the body data from the end and just blend those two, ignoring the spots in between. Then you could use it to patch the glitches to make the performance much smoother. I'm using draggable handles right now to fix a frame or two here and there, but it can only do so much. Without the ability to record a frame for one body pose or edit the body poses manually, this could be the next best thing.

The Body behavior is great, but I'd rather be able to use it for recording one frame takes like I'm used to. You could add that in, by allowing a 1-Take Frame recording to have a 5 second countdown (or have it linked to the Body Behavior countdown when that behavior is armed). That would allow for those of us who don't want to try and fix bad spots in a body recording by recording a specific pose real quick and allow us to stretch that pose to however long we need it for.

Also, being able to point the hands rotationally would be nice. How am I supposed to flip my hands around like a fish if they just rotate with the forearm?! Just a thought.

Hi Guys!

I think a feature "ZOrder Behavior" would improve Character Animator a lot!

For example, consider a character sitting behind a table - where both are separated puppets. As expected, puppet character should be BEHIND the table puppet - but the arms should be OVER the table. Today, it's a big problem when you are dealing with different puppets.

A Zorder feature would solve this problem at recording time. By adding this new behavior to the arm and changing a simple index value, the arm layer can OVERLAP another puppets. So, the character arms would appear OVER the table puppet, although the character by itself is BEHIND the table puppet.

It seems very easy to implement and would save a lot of time of animators when interacting with different puppets, avoiding hard workarounds to simulate this effect.

Thank you!
Andre Guedes