While adjusting settings in my newest puppet I discovered that replays are affected by the dependence/independence settings of the puppet.

For example, the replays of my puppet were recorded while the torso was set as independent. Once I changed the torso to dependent, the replays became erratic and the arm positions were completely messed up. Almost all of the replays need to re-recorded. Adjusting other settings like the attach style and dependence/independence of other groups did not resolve the issue.

Please:
1. Include this in the documentation and info about Character Animator. The current details imply that replays are "set in stone" and would therefore not be affected by independence changes.
2. Add a toggle setting for replays that allows them to adhere to the puppet settings of when they were recorded.

After upgrading to Mojave MacOS, we are having significant performance issues with our existing CA live-streaming setups. Our setup is this:

CA 2018 or 2019 (720 project, 20fps) -> Wirecast or OBS (via NDI or Syphon, tried both) -> RTMP (1.5mbps 30fps 540p) to our servers

When running some of our triggered animations of our puppets, the FPS out of CA drops to single digits, and seems to combat Wirecast or OBS, which in turn drops dozens/hundreds frames on Wirecast or OBS. This did not happen in previous versions of MacOS, and we have taken the same project files/config and run them on an identical High Sierra machine with no issues, so there seems to be a priority battle for real-time processing that Wirecast and CA fight over with some more intensive animations.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16gb ram
Radeon Pro 450 2048 MB
Intel HD Graphics 530 1536 MB

The new Replays feature is cool, but it is missing a “loop forever” mode. I want to hit a trigger (e.g. latched) and have the sequence play forever until the trigger is hit again. At present a replay plays once and stops and you have to trigger it again to get it to repeat, even when trigger latching is on.

I assume a third replay mode of “loop forever while triggered” is wanted as a trigger mode.

The usecase is an “idle” state for the puppet. You can record an idle state (fidgeting etc) and and some other states (“frustrated”, “angry”, “tired”, “bored” etc) then when live streaming you just hit a key to change the state and the puppet keeps acting in that way until the state changes again. The replay might be like 20+ seconds long so it does not feel too repetitive.

The facial tracking in Ch is so great, it makes me crazy that we seemingly have no access to it. The mouth is tracked in fine detail, but it seems almost entirely discarded. You can't record the markers, and I can't seem to find any way to drive visemes with video (sorry guys, but driving it with audio is too sketchy)

If Ch can give me a real-time, 1:1 line up with my face and the trackers, why can't I drive more with that? And why do I have to use AE's slow and error prone facial tracking to do more robust mapping to controllers and deformers?

When I watch the tracking markers lock up around my facial features in the camera view, I feel like the most powerful tool in Ch is just mocking me. There it is, bargain facial motion capture, and I can't do anything with it but drive two shapes on a puppet "smile" and "surprise"... :(

One thing that "explainer animation" tools often have is a lot of pre-populated settings / objects for characters (and sometimes animations for those objects). For instance, you can drag and drop a "cell phone" to a character, and it will have them hold it, and you can drag in an animation of them tapping the screen.

Other 2D animation tools have things like walk/run cycles, jumps and hops, dancing, etc, that can drive the animation of a character at a certain point.

Not only would it be great to have a library of tools to create rich movements (and add objects, bg furniture, etc), but it would be great if custom variants could be posted on a public forum to share with other users.

Right now this is probably limited by the fact that a scene is essentially just a single "puppet", which is hugely limiting. Ideally a scene should contain multiple puppets, objects, and cameras. But once that happens, being able to quickly build actions with pre-programmed objects / actions would be AMAZING for quickly creating 2D character animations.