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
Developing the Eyes
So let's have quick look at the eyes here, okay, and how they're working. Now I'm gonna rearm the camera, okay, and move my eyes around like so, and you can see that as I do that, they're reaching the maximum parts of all of that space. So when this is put together, I'm gonna switch out to the rigging workspace here for the first time. Okay, and come up to the head here, you can see the head, and all of these different things are ways that you can map manually if you need to. If you've done the layers properly you don't have to. But manually you can map things to different parts of the face, okay? So you can map all of the eye parts there, and set the eye limits, but you don't always want the eyes to go to the extremes of the actual eye shape, you perhaps want them to sit roughly within an inner circle of doing that. So what I'm gonna do is swap out to another puppet here. So if I just come back into the record workspace here, and go back to the Goldbeard scene. Okay so I should double...
tap on that, it will load the scene, Goldbeard's back with us, and I'll go to the rigging workspace, and just choose, make sure I choose my puppets, so if I just double tap on Goldbeard there it should load into that space. Alright so this is that puppet. Here's its layer structure on the left-hand side, and I'm gonna swap out to that in Photoshop. Okay, so if I come up to Goldbeard here, here's what I've done to change that, okay? So when you are developing the eyes, what you need to do, if I just come up to the eyes here, so this is the head group, just here like so, okay? I'm just gonna collapse the body group, just to get the confusion out of that, and then I'll expand the left eye group, and I'll turn everything off here just for a moment. So here's left eye, okay? Has pretty much gone, okay? So first of all, I drew this layer, which is, I know it's the pupil of the eyeball technically, but I'm dealing in a 2D space here, so I want this, this is actually the white of the eye that I've got there. The eyeball itself I've actually drawn on top as a red shape, but I've turned off the visibility for that red shape. But because Character Animator recognizes Left Eyeball, that layer name like so with an uppercase L and an uppercase E, it limits the movement of the eye to that region, okay? So you can change that, and make your eye movements more convincing, because if you've got a large eyeball like this, and if I turn off the left eyebrow you can see how big that is. It goes right up underneath the eyebrow there. Okay, that means the eye could be traveling right the way up here. Very, very different look to the one you would actually expect to see, right? So you just can have a part of the eye disappearing. That's a really good way for you to limit that eye movement is to do that. So that's something I urge you to do when you're developing that. The other things you're going to need to look at, okay if I just turn on, for example, the left pupil. So the pupil and the eye relationship match just fine. I can turn off the left eyeball layer there so that it looks more natural now. There are a few different ways you can approach doing this. You don't have to have upper and lower eyelids in your puppet while you're getting started, alright? But once you've kind of got the idea of putting the puppet together, and you kind of get where everything goes, start experimenting with that. You can also do many, many other things, such as adding some sort of behavior to that which will change the rate it goes. But the upper and lower eyelid together means that I can squint. So if I needed Goldbeard to be really mean, or trying to see something that is difficult for him to see, I could squint like that, and the program will recognize and move my upper and lower eyelids together so I could really, really narrow the eyes. Okay, so and if I just go for the left eyelid button, you can see there, that is there like so, and there's the left eyelid top, okay? So they can move up and down across the eye. I'm just gonna turn those two things off. And then the other thing I've got here is a blink, and that's something else that Character Animator recognizes, and it will actually actuate that once I blink. So the eyes are perhaps the most complicated part of putting that together at the top of the head there, but of course it's the bit at the bottom of the head which is important. So we're gonna let Goldbeard show us a little bit more about that. So I'm just gonna turn off the camera for a second, okay, and what I'm going to do is go to the transform options here. So these are all of the options, or properties, of the Goldbeard puppet on the right hand side here. And I've got this transform, and what I'm going to do is just move the position x, so I'm just gonna hover over that, and then press down and drag to the left and take Goldbeard over the screen there like that. And in fact, if I wanted to bring Goldbeard closer towards the camera, I could change the scale and of course change the y position. Make it greater to make it go down like so. So repositioned Goldbeard, and I'm gonna turn off the green screen, and you can see, here's Goldbeard's class for visemes.
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.