Adding Key Triggers & Sequences
Lesson 10 from: Fundamentals of Adobe Character Animator CCTony Harmer
Adding Key Triggers & Sequences
Lesson 10 from: Fundamentals of Adobe Character Animator CCTony Harmer
Lessons
Class Introduction
07:44 2Sketching Out the Character
11:52 3Building the Face and Head
16:32 4Developing the Eyes
06:17 5Phonemes and Visemes
09:55 6Building the Body & Adding Gestures
17:46 7Checking the Hierarchy and Structure
14:33 8The Best Way To Test and Fix Problems
11:07Lesson Info
Adding Key Triggers & Sequences
Gonna swap back to the Gold Beard puppet, where I've got an example of that ready, okay? So back to Gold Beard. Okay? Hopefully you don't mind the swapping around. I just kind of wanted some variation in what you're actually seeing, okay? And I'm actually going to turn off the visibility for the pirate island thing. So we're not looking at the wavy flag. Gonna get my transform for Gold Beard, who's highlighted in the timeline, just here. Okay, and gonna take his exposition. Notice how I'm scrubbing over the top of that. You can see the values change. I'm actually now moving my cursor up the screen, and you can see I'm moving that very quickly. You don't just have to go it left and right. Up and down will change the values as well. Now you might not be able to see that directly on the screen. Don't worry about it. My description I'm sure will help with that. Similarly, with the y value, I can just drown down. (laughs) Drown. Thinking too much pirate now. Drag downwards, just there. Ther...
e we go. So, Gold Beard has a draggable in the form of this arm here. Does not have one on this arm. See if you can just test your memory on how we go about adding that. See how quickly we can do it. Have a think for moment. Think, right, what's the first thing I wanna do there? If you're thinking, right, I wanna get that node up to the top there, up to the top of the shoulder, and then I wanna add a draggable to the wrist, and then I wanna add some sticks to restrict warping. Oops, not anther draggable like I've done there, then you're game on. There you go, so you can do that. Perfect. So he's got those things now. Both of those arms will drag. Oops, I stretched that one out just a little bit far. Just there, so there you go. He's got that. He's got his hook. Oh, I've got an itch. There, argh. Perfect. Right, so he's got that, and also, he's got these key triggers. So, what I'm gonna press on the keyboard is I'm gonna press the 2 key right down because I've mapped the 2 key to do something specifically. If I press that now, you can see that whir thing goes on. Can you see that? Okay. Now I've got another key assigned as a trigger, and that's the 3 key, and what the 3 key does is it swaps out to the whisk, okay? If I tap 3, swaps to the whisk like so. If I tap 3 again, it swaps it back, and that's because this has got what's called a latching behavior, as well. It means it will stay put, yep? Sometimes you want things to stay put. You don't wanna continually hold a key down, 'cause you might have other things to press during a performance, okay? But that's what I've got here, so it just latches, okay? So that's what it does, so if I press 2, 3, like that, you see the whir followed by the replacement of the whisk, so it looks like something else is actually popping up. If I press 2, 3 again, you get that brief thing of the whizzing around, followed by the hook, and it's just easy, 2, 3, 2, 3, 'cause I mapped it that way. You can map them to whatever you want, whatever's comfortable for you. If I go to the rigging workspace, okay? And I'll come down to the left arm here, and those three things, so you can see the world's got that cycle layer's behavior on it, which is a component of what I'm doing, okay? And whisk, okay? And hook both have triggers, and I can tell that, okay, by these markers up at the top here. You can see that it's assigned triggers up on the top right column there. Moving your eye downwards and to the left, in the interface, you can actually see the trigger's panel, okay? Has those things inside of it. So you can target a layer, okay? And then type a number in the field that's there. Okay, I'm gonna replace the numbers that I've got to swap these things out, okay? What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make the, rather than being 2, 3, I'll make it 2, 4, or something like 3, 4, so I'll change whirl first of all to 3, like so, okay? Now they're both lighting up like that, saying 3, 4, is both of those things. You do know that, right? And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. I'm gonna change that to 4, like so, okay. And now it's not warning me about anything else. Okay, so 3, 4 now fires that behavior. Go to record, okay? If I press 2, nothing happens, right? 'Cause I've reassigned the trigger. Press 3 whirry stuff. Press 4, it toggles out to that, okay? 3, 4, 3, 4, like so and that's it. Done. Okay, now you can build these as a sequence by dragging layers into this region just here, or by tapping plus and adding things on. And a swap set is something you can build that basically plays through a sequence, and swaps something over, so the one at the top, hook, okay? That's the default thing. It's the hook that's on there all the time. I expect it to be there. I don't want to press a trigger to happen. And it also means, if nothing else is happening, right? In that set, then it will revert to that. When I press 4, as it is here now, yeah? Or whatever key I assign to it, it will switch to the whisk, and it does that automatically. But if I trigger the whirl, then it plays that whirl behavior from that layer group, okay? And that's achieved if I just get rid of those things, just for a moment, okay? So I'm just gonna highlight that and delete it, okay? What you can do is select a range of layers, so if I go for the whisk, here, hold down shift, and select the hook, so I've got whisk, the whirl parent group and the two things there, and drag those into the triggers panel, okay? Then they appear like so. They've all got their own individual triggers. But, if I just delete those, and create a new swap set, yeah? And drag those things in, I can put those things into the swap set, or I can do them individually. In fact, I'll just do that. I'll drag the whisk in there, I'll drag the whirl parent group in, underneath that, okay? And I'll drag in the hook actually to the top there. And in fact I think I'll take the whisk down to the bottom, there you go. And just wanna make sure they're all in the swap set. Can you see how I'm moving that up? And making sure that they line up in the right place. So I'm just gonna reorder that slightly. Don't have to, but I think it makes more sense for it to be that way. Okay? So now, if I go back in, pull that down, into there, there we go. That will go there, and drag the whirl upwards. Okay? So the whirl hasn't got the cycle layer's behavior on it at the moment, but if I just assign 2 to that, okay? And then it should show me a little icon here, if it's got a behavior, and 3 to that, okay? Then it should swap those things out. So, if I do the 2, there it is, whirring away, so you can see that layer's playing, and 3 like so, and so that's how you can build out a swap set, and use a sequence of triggers to play, because maybe a hand doesn't go from that to that. There's a transition, and you might want to draw part of that transition. You don't have to draw everything for super slow mo. Draw the bits in between, because the eye fills in the gaps, yeah? So if you've got it from a finger, like that, right? Sorry, pointing gesture. You've got something like that, right? To something like that? Then draw a big in between, so sort of the finger's halfway curled out, or even a smudge. It doesn't have to be anatomically correct. It's on there for a fraction of a second, just like those whirs are on there, but that's how you can build those particular things.
Ratings and Reviews
Gary
Great Class! I am just beginning to learn Adobe Character Animator and this class was a great starter for me to learn some of the background on how the program works.