So I am pressing Ctrl + E to bring up AI so I can edit my puppet but all that does is duplicate my puppet, It does not bring me to AI. Even if I were to click edit original the same thing happens.

This might be a bug issue. I've already tried uninstalling AI and CA and reinstalling but that didn't do anything. Please help.

Just to be clear, AI can open when I lauch it by itself, but it is not loading via Character Animator. Neither is photoshop. The edit original option just duplicates my puppet instead of allowing me to edit it.

Thanks.

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 think I've found a bug with magnets. Any advice would be really appreciated.

I'm doing something weird. I have a character with shoulder length hair, and I want the dangling hair to be on top of the shoulder, but I want the forearm and hands to be in front of the hair.

The way I've done it, is to make a normal arm with shoulder, elbow, wrist tags, bones, arm IK etc below the hair.

Then I made a copy of the forearm, and put it above the hair, and used a magnet with weld to parent the top forearm to to the one from underneath that has the arm IK.

It works well, in fact it kind of looks better, because the elbow isnt being mesh deformed anymore.

BUT, whenever the top forearm passes through a 180 degree rotation, it freaks out for half a second and appears in random locations in the frame.

If I pause the playback on that frame, within a few hundred milliseconds, the program fixes itself and the forearm returns to the right place, but on export, the frame doesnt wait to be be fixed before it outputs, and so I have these glitches, whenever the top object goes through a 180 degree rotation point.

Im am guessing that at that point the software goes from what would be 181 degree rotation to a -179 degree rotation, so that if you windmill an arm, you dont end up with 1000+ degree rotations, which makes sense, but the program freaks for just a moment as it changes rotation values from the 180+ value to the corresponding negative rotation value.

But on export, the program doesnt wait for the fix before exporting the frame - probably due to the real time nature of the program.

I could export single frames of the problematic frames as fixes, but that would take a lot of extra time.

Thoughts?

Bug fix?

Thanks for reading this and any thoughts you may have!

System info
    Application: Character Animator v3.3.1.6
    OS: macOS v10.15.5, RAM: 16.00 GB, CPUs (logical): 8