All right, now that we have a puppet
rigged and ready to roll, time to have
some fun customizing it with adobe illustrator.
So if you've been waiting to create your own
puppet for Character Animator, now is the time.
This tutorial is going to cover a
lot of customization, and it's really important
to understand three things about this.
Number one, you really do want to
start learning this app with a pre
built, sort of rigged or tagged character.
With that in mind, if you are hoping to work with
a female character, I have added that to the resources.
So if I go to File and
Import, notice that you also have roberta.
So in addition to Rob, we also have
roberta, and you can see there she is.
And you're going to want to look at the
previous video to lock the base down and maybe
change some of the properties for the face.
Okay, so you have that option.
And I should also point out that there are
a bunch of great options on adobe's Character Animator
website, as well as heads of curriculum, which has
a ton of great puppets for free as well.
Okay, so starting with all the tags sort of named
correctly will save you from a lot of rigging issues.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is that this workflow
that I'm about to show you is
going to work in illustrator or photoshop.
So these are both illustrator files.
That's why I get the AI button there.
But if it was a photoshop puppet,
you would launch photoshop with this.
So that's the second thing.
The third thing to note is
that this workflow is nonlinear.
That is, if I were to do a
recording and change the puppet, the source puppet,
and illustrator photoshop, the puppet would actually change.
With the recording in place, you don't have
to re record, which is really great.
So it's non linear, and that
gives you a lot of flexibility.
Okay, so now that we understand those
options, let's hop in and do it.
I'm going to go ahead and click the Edit
Original button for let's go with Rob here.
And here we are with Rob.
So if you're not familiar with adobe illustrator,
just a few things to point out.
The black arrow is for selecting, and that is great.
But if I'm trying to say change
an eyebrow, that's not so great.
If I want to select just the eyebrow,
the white arrow would allow me to grab
individual paths inside of a group.
So for this tutorial, I'm going to just
work with a white arrow, and we're just
going to play with the fill and stroke.
So, for example, if I wanted Rob to
be Alien Rob, I could actually select his
head and I could change the fill.
So the fill is over here.
If I'm in the essentials classic, I also get it here.
It's also over here.
So there's a lot of redundancies in illustrator.
But I could choose another color.
And you can see that if I make raw blue and I
could again using the white arrow, I could hold on shift and
make his ears blue and I could make his shirts.
Let's make it charcoal gray. Okay.
There's a couple of other places we
might also customize and play with here.
But now that I've got Alien Rob ready to roll,
I can just go to File and Save and back
at the ranch in character animator notice that shazam.
All the updates I made have been saved.
If I look at my history, you can see
that incorporate external edits is one of the steps.
I could always go back and forth and
say, do I like that or not?
Let's say we leave it okay.
If I wanted to, let's say, change
some paths though, let's keep doing it.
So I'm going to go back to
project and again go to Edit original.
If I wanted his head to be more spiky,
I could drag select over the anchor points.
There may be two there.
So that's why I drag selected.
Give him a cone head.
Maybe I will switch to the black
arrow now that I've selected that path.
And maybe I'll squish his head.
I'll hold down option here to squish it in.
So now he's got a nice little cone head.
If you're wondering about the ears, it looks
like there is a little fill on there.
So if you haven't played with illustrator to get rid
of the fill, you can always have none said.
Maybe for his goatee.
Maybe I want that to be green. Right?
So we could really get crazy with this.
Not just with colors, but with all sorts of stuff.
So I could maybe hold down shift, grab a couple
of anchor points, give them some really pointy ears.
And if I go to File and Save
again back in character animator, you can see
that I'm starting to create my own character.
I could delete the goatee, I could
move or change the eye shape.
I can do whatever I want here and again.
If I do a recording and then suddenly decide I
want them to be orange, I just make it orange
and it's automatically going to be updated in that recording.
We'll cover recording exclusively in
a couple other videos.
So that is how you can customize a
preexisting and prereg illustrator file in character animator.