The cycle layers behavior is the most versatile
behavior in all of character animator and can
take your puppet to a whole nother level.
So instead of just having like a popup exclamation
or hardeyes, we can actually do framebyframe animation with
a trigger using the cycle layers behavior.
Okay, so let's do it with the hardy.
So let's make them kind kind of get bigger and cycle
through different sizes to give it a little more life.
Okay, so I'm going to go to magnus
and I'm going to go to Edit Original.
So what I want to do is actually I'm
going to duplicate these hard eyes a few times.
So I'll turn the visibility on, select that
group, and I'm going to hit Command C.
Then I'm going to hit Command F.
That would be controlc.
Control F on a PC and the F is paste in front,
so that allows it to paste right on top of it rather
than Control V, which would be the middle of the screen.
So that's a good one to know.
The next thing I need to do
is I actually want to rename these.
So it's going to be a cycle.
So I want it to start maybe this
size and then it's going to get bigger.
So I'm double clicking and just renaming
it these sort of three different steps.
But right now nothing really would change
because they're all the same size.
So maybe step one is this size, but
step two, I want them to be bigger.
Now there's a few ways we could scale these up.
Simplest way would probably be switching now
to the Black arrow and holding down
option and shift and scaling them up.
Okay, so step two, they're bigger and then
step three, if I select that layer I
could make them even bigger still.
So again I'm holding down option
and shift together right up.
Now these would sort of shoot out from the middle.
I could make the hearts have the same
centers but let's just test drive that. Okay?
So now that I've got the sort of cycle
of one, two, three steps or sizes, let's go
ahead and get all of these in one group.
So I'm going to hold down shift here, select all
three of those layers and hit command g again.
That would be control G on a PC
and I'm going to rename this parts.
Okay, now when I go back to File and Save, when
we cruise back to character animator and I hit that same
button, I get all of them at the same time.
And I don't want that, I want it to actually
go through those three steps one at a time. Okay?
To do that I'm going to go to rig and
I'm going to go to the hearts layer and I'm
going to say I want to cycle through that, I
want to cycle through these one, two, three steps.
And to do that I'm going to go over and add a behavior.
And again, that behavior is called cycle layers.
When I apply that, you can see there are some defaults
which will test drive right now and it'll work okay.
And it's still going to be triggered by the letter S,
because Hearts has the same name that it had before.
If I did change the name, I would have to sort of
rebuild that trigger, but it just kept the name the same.
So that's why it still works.
But when I go to record and I hit S, it
just kind of shoots out one time and it's very fast.
So let's go ahead and customize that a little bit.
So instead of it shooting out quite so fast, I might
say, hey, instead of 30 frames per second and having only
one frame, maybe I'll do it at two frames, which means
that it would be playing back at 15 frames per second.
So it's going to give a little more time
and I don't want it to happen just once.
I want it to happen continuously.
So as long as I hold the button
down, it's going to loop through that cycle.
Let's go ahead and see what's what that does.
So when I go back to record and I hit D, just
getting S, you can see I get that nice little animation.
And so you can see how using the cycle layers
behavior can take your triggers to a whole other level.