Digital Puppets

In this session we looked at adobe character animator and how to animate using motion tracking.

I began by creating a character in Photoshop. It was very important how I organised the layers because I put it into character animator and the software had to be able to distinguish each element of the character. So, the arms, torso, head, and all the facial features had to be in different folders.

This is how I structured the file. I later went in and added more mouth shapes because I wanted to be able to lip sync the animation.

Doing this excersise taught me the basics of rigging a character, and anchoring points in animation. I find it really interesting how this technique of animating based on a live feed is used by real animated tv programs to speed up work flow.