Alright, rigging is the secret
superpower behind character animator.
So let's jump back into that magnus project
and talk about rigging, hierarchy, tags and behaviors.
alright, so when a character animator puppet
works well or doesn't work at all,
it's usually because of Rigging.
So let's talk about it.
If I cruise over to the project panel and I
select magnus, I'm going to go ahead and launch the
editor original button here and that is going to open
up illustrator and reveal the layer structure for magnus here.
If you don't see a Layers panel, just cruise
line up to window and go to Layers.
Okay, so a little bit of anatomy.
magnus here is made up of a head and body.
So this is considered the parent object
and these are children of that parent.
Inside of the head, I have other
child objects of this parent object.
All of that is called hierarchy.
Each of these layers within the
hierarchy is tagged or named.
Yeah, different body parts.
And the idea with character animator is
to label these body parts correctly so
that animator knows how to animate them.
There are some like head and body that are required.
Those are a bare minimum for character animator
and there are some that have very specific
behaviors or effects that are associated with them.
So things like eyes or maybe a mouth or maybe eyebrows,
you don't have to use all of the body parts that
are possible, but you do have to have those bare minimum.
The other thing to note about tagging is
that you can actually add a little plus
sign in illustrator or in photoshop when you're
building up your characters and that's going to
actually create an independent object in character animator.
So what does that mean?
Let me hop on over and take a look.
So we're back in character animator.
I'm going to go to rig.
Okay, so now that we understand how these all got
their names and sort of the general basic layer structure,
notice how everything that used to have a plus sign
next to it now has a crown.
A crowned object basically means it's independent.
This doesn't mean it's floating freely about.
It's still going to be attached to the parent object, but might
be allowed to move, let's say up and down in case of
an eyebrow or left and right if it's an eyeball.
So still attached to the parent object, but has
some freedom of animation within the parent object.
Okay, when we're talking about tagging, it is good to
know that there is a sort of fallback option and
that is over here in the Tags panel.
So in the event that you accidentally misspelled
the left eye, it's probably better to go
back and just change the name.
But you could also cruise over
here and actually tag it.
So if you tag something the wrong way or
wanted to maybe have a combination of tags, you
can actually do that in the tags panel.
All right, now that we understand layer hierarchy
and parent objects and child objects and layer
tags and independent tags, it's time to talk
about behaviors for just a little bit.
So, for example, if I click the head layer
here, notice that if I cruise over to its
tag, it actually says that eye, gaze, and face
are associated behaviors with that object.
So it's pre built into that.
Things like eyebrows will also have certain
behaviors or animation effects linked to that.
So it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
In addition to these behaviors that are automatically associated
with specific tags, it's important to note that character
animator also comes with a range of advanced behaviors
that you can add to your puppet.
Okay, so now that you understand the basics
of rigging, including hierarchy, tags, and behaviors, it's
time to work with a customizable character that
you can make all your own.