Draw animated puppets! (with Adobe Character Animator and Photoshop)

1. intro: Hello and welcome to this class on creating your own original characters and Adobe character animator and Photoshop. This class, I'm going to teach you a step-by-step process for drawing and then animating your own original characters. It will be fairly easy for anyone to create their own original characters. Lonza process is automated and we will also be working from a template provided by character animator. In addition, we will go over some of the features in character animator, as well as how to create your own original animations. Let's get started. 2. blank puppet: All right, so first thing we need to do is create a new, new project. Now we'll go to the home screen. Here you have all the example puppets. And we're going to go to see more. What we're looking for is a blank. Pop it there. We're going to use as a template to work from. Here is the blank puppet. You can go ahead and download it. Here's the downloaded file. I'm going to go ahead and move that to the folder that we have our other character animator files in. I'll go ahead and unzip that. This open that up. Go to File Import. You want to find the puppet follow, we're going to use the Photoshop version. Now we have our Puppet. You'll notice over here we have all these labels. These are all going to be different layers in your Photoshop file. And here we have the triggers which are special animations. Let's create a new scene. We have our character and our new scene blank. Alright, so the next step is to open up the character in Photoshop and start working on that. Surette to right-click and hit Edit Original. This should open up your puppet. Blank puppet in Photoshop. 3. blank puppet layers: Alright, so here we are in Photoshop with our blank puppet template. Should have a look over here at the Layers palette. And you'll notice here we have the blank and that's the name. Then we have these two major groups here, the head group and the body group. You can see what's in each. And the way character animator works is that all these different layers are turned on and off for a different animations and for sinking speech also. So let's have a look here. For example, in the mouth group, we have all these layers for different sounds. I'll actually has two layers because it's animated. Will leave the neutral on. There's even a sad mouth with its own set of sounds and layers. Right eyebrow, left eyebrow, left eye, right eye, nose, the face background, and then the body parts. Basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna use these layers as a template and just redraw them in our own style. 4. original character concept sketch: The first thing we want to do is we want to sketch out our entire character. What we'll do here is lower the opacity and we can have that as reference. Can just turn it off if you'd like. Actually, I'll leave it on for right this minute and I'll start a new group. Let's just call this concept. This is just going to hold our layers for figuring out how you want to create this new character. This is just gonna be a sketch is we're going to refine it when we do all the individual parts. So don't worry about having separate layers are animating it. You just want to have an idea of the overall feel of the character that we're going to be creating here. So we'll do a couple, a couple characters, switch to the brush. And it's probably useful to use a tablet for this. Turn off a blank for now, and let's try to create a couple, a couple of characters. I'm just going to do this black and white for now. Let's say for the first character we do some something with the big head, then small body, and then arms. Then we'll give them some old cartoony looking eyes. Going to actually look like, I don't know, I used to draw things a lot. So let's make this a little pig character. Make sure you add a mouth. This is actually not too bad. We give them overall or something. Let's refine this a little bit. Bring down the opacity of that kind of like this sort of balloon shape is pretty, pretty interesting. It's exaggerate that balloon shape a little bit. Ears. You want to have all the essential features so the eyes that people's can't read, the eyebrows, nose, and the mouth. Round out the body a little bit. The legs a little bigger. The arms. Let's add a couple of fingers. Maybe a little tail. All right, actually that's not too bad. Let's try one more. Let's try something a little more abstract. We've got one. Let's try something with a smaller head. Let's do some kind of weird shape. Maybe. Eyebrows, mouth, nose. Got this blocky pill shape. So let's keep going with that. Give me some legs, some arms and hands. I'm going to give them it's sort of hands just for the sketch. Some hair. Hair is nice because you can add physics to it later. Maybe some areas have all the major features. What if these are okay? What if we tried to do a little bit of a hybrid like the cartoon eyes on this. I don't like proportions of the face as of March, I think the proportions are a little more interesting on this character. I don't like the portions of the body either. I like this fuller body but you know, whatever you want to do, you can into whatever, do whatever you think is interesting, whatever your style is. Let's keep that block-like head. Keep the ears. I like the cartoon eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, the hair on top, the body, legs, maybe a little long run the arms. Let's compare that to that. Actually, I like these simplified eyes better. Although these, this one reads pretty well. If we make this character a pig, that is actually okay. All right, let's, let's go with this. We have this character with the pill shaped head, spotty, simple body, low snout, and some classic cartoon eyes. We have our basic sketch. We can. 5. concept color: Once we have the drawing of the puppet ready, we should probably figure out the colors. Let's add another layer, put it underneath. We have a brush to make a bigger brush size. Some colors. Let's make it purple pig. Just using the mouse right now to lay in, laying the color purple for that, the eyes should be a little off. The gloves. I can leave that off white, awesome. Shoes and share. Go with a shirt, a shirt, orange. These are all just sort of whatever I think I want to try. Just good like that. Then. Blue pants. This just give give them some shoes. Green truth, weird, weird, colorful puppet. Give them some green hair. Now that we have the color in, we have our sketching, we can go ahead and start working on the actual puppet. 6. puppet head: So first let's close this group with our concept. This open up the blank and turn this back up to 100 for the opacity. Let's start with the head. We're going to start with is the face background. We can do is I can turn off the visibility of all these other layers. We'll just focus on the head for right now. The face background. Let's open up this face background. And what you have here are the elements. So you have the shadow, the overall shape of the head, the left ear, the right ear. So let's look at our concept. Let's drop the opacity on this. What we can do actually is we can just create 11 entire layer that has all our elements. Will just add a new layer. Turn off all of these. Trace what we have. All right, so there's our head. Now we want to put a layer underneath and add the color. Go back here. Opacity backup. Go to that color layer. I'm hitting Alt using the brush. I'm going to select that color. Go back to our Puppet and we create a layer underneath for the new color. Turn that off. For now. I'm going to use a mouse. Since I have pressure sensitivity on the, on the tablet. Don't have it set for the mouse. I'll get the solid color. If I use the mouse. A little bit more imprecise, but I like actually like that. It makes it kind of Ruffin, goes outside the lines a little bit. So now we have our face background. 7. puppet head part 2: It's basically just a little bit of top with some color. Now let's draw that. We can use the background color. Now. Let's create a new layer. And then we'll color on that layer. Clean that up a little bit. All right, so now we have eyelid. We can get rid of the previous eyelid. Blink, which is basically the eye closed. We'll do is we'll just bring it all the way down, bring the eyelid all the way down for the blank. Or maybe up to here. Let's create a new layer and we'll turn the eye lid off. And let's draw the blink. Hit B and D, wire it up there. And basically redraw the eyeball area. Turn the eyeball off and the pupil to help us draw this and then create another layer underneath the color. Be Alt. Select the color. And now I'm switching to my mouse. And actually it's gonna be hard to read. Let's turn off the face background for a second. Can delete this. This is the right blank. Look a little messy over top of the other ones. So let's clean it up just a little bit. There's some of this purple I think that's as overlapping. Actually that seems to have done it. You've got the right blank, the eyelid, and the eyeball. Now we need to just do the same thing for the left eye. If you wanted to, you could just you could just duplicate everything you did for the right eye, but let's just redraw it. I think that'll be, that'll give it a little more character. This is our sketch. I think we have a good idea. We can work just from the right eye for the left eye, the eyeball. We don't really even need the reference anymore. Delete that, turn those off. I'm going to hit B and D. Reduce the brush. Let's draw in the left I, left eyeball. Next, we'll add another layer here for the color. Going to hit Alt. I'm just gonna select that and I'm going to switch to the mouse so I get a solid fill. Clearing up a little bit. Alright, let's see eyeball. Let's go to the pupil. Let's create a new layer, B and D. Down a brush. We're going to make another one of these Pac-Man eyes. You'll notice that there's different levels of this gray and black hats because I'm using a pressure sensitive tablet and I'm not getting a 100% opacity the whole time. I'm okay with that. It gives you a little bit more of an sketchy artistic feel. If you don't like that, you can always go in and either redraw it or change the settings in your brushes. All right, so let's go on to the lid. Let's make sure it matches the right lid. Under the left eye lid, Let's create a new layer for the drawing. I'll go and create a new layer for the color. Awesome. Let's draw that in. Select the background color and then switch to the mouse again. Let's clean this up. Now we have the lids. Let's do the left blank. Let's turn on the right blink for reference. Looking at the left blank. Just wanted two layers, one for the drawing and one for the color. Hitting due to switch back to the defaults. On the wrong layer. I need to turn it on. Now let's paint underneath. There we are. There's the blank. Let's get rid of that previous one and now we have the left eye. Let's go ahead and save this. Switch back to character animator and see it update. All right, We're off to a good start. 8. puppet head eyebrows: So now we're going to finish up the eyes with the eyebrows. And these are pretty, pretty simple. Just a little eyebrow line over top. The left. Revisit our concept. Switch to the brush. Down. Hit D for defaults. This looks nice, I like that. And then do the other one. Get rid of the original ones. And now we have some eyebrows. And this is almost done basically, all we have to do now is the mouth and maybe add some hair. 9. mouth: All right, so now we're onto the mouth. And in my opinion, this is where the magic really starts to happen. So let's go to the mouth group and turn it on. For, just for now, we'll select the mouth group. Let's put it in place. Go ahead and save this. And go back to character animator. Figure back to the scene. You should see the mouth animating already. Since I have the microphone on right here. This is pretty cool. You could just leave it like this, but we want to keep the style consistent with the rest of the drawing, will go back into Photoshop and basically redraw the mouth. Here we are back in Photoshop. Let's open up the mouth group. You'll notice we have all these different shapes on different layers. What we're gonna do is go step-by-step and redraw each mouth shape. We'll start with neutral first. And it's important to keep the layer names the same. What we'll do is we'll duplicate all of these layers. I can move the copy over just for reference. Then the original, we'll go ahead and select all hit Control a and delete. And then what we draw the mountain. It's not bad. Try a little wider and see how it looks. Smaller. I think that looks good. You put some cheeks on there. All right. Now the neutral done, go ahead and delete the neutral copy. Hit control D to de-select. Then we can, instead of deleting the drawing, we can delete the layer itself. Now we'll move on to D. And I'll turn off the neutral. And we'll do the same thing. We will go ahead and duplicate the layer, move the copy over, and then we'll work on the original d. This is whenever you create a d sound. So it's kind of like the teeth are showing. Select all, delete B for brush. And let's redraw this. We need to put another layer underneath for the color. I'm going to hit X, which switches the foreground and background color. So we have white as the foreground color. And then I'm going to switch to the mouse. Paint in teeth. That actually might be a little too bright. Let's grab the gray from the eyes. That actually seems a little too light too. Seems a little too dark to me. It'll bring up just a little bit. This is actually a nice app. You get a little bit of shadow on the sides. You know what, I'm gonna select a little bit of that and add it there. Nice little touch. Now I can select these two layers and I'm going to merge them. Do Layer, Merge Layers. Shortcut is Control E. Now these two layers are merged and again, I can delete the copy. Alright, so next we'll move on to the 0s E, which is showing the teeth and the mouth open a little bit. Go ahead and duplicate this. Move the copy over. Select all delete. Switch to the brush. Switch. The colors will draw in the mouth. Create a new layer underneath for the color. Will switch to the background color, will do a lighter color. I'm going to hit Control D, which is de-select. Then we can merge our drawing with the color. Then we can delete the copy. Go on to the F, which has the character kind of biting it, slip. Duplicate the layer. Move over the copy. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. This might be a little hard to draw. Select all delete. Switch to the brush, switch to the black. I'm going to shrink the brush download a bit too. Let's have a look at this. The mouth again. I'm going to draw the top lip and I'm going to draw this biting first. There we go. Add a layer underneath for the color switch to the background. Sample that since for this is for adding some shading to the teeth. Go ahead and save while we're at it. Now we can merge these two layers. Control D to unselect and we'll do the copy and save it again just in case onto the L. It has the top teeth and the tongue. Duplicate that. Move the copy either way and select all. And we're on the later delete, switch to the brush colors. And I'm going to switch back to it a slightly larger brush. And just copy that math. Straw on the tongue. Now we need to create a layer underneath for the color. Hit X to switch. Selecting this eye color for the shadow with the teeth, the shaded part. Then we need to use black here. I'm just going to sample the red they use for the color of the tongue. Clean this up a little bit. Alright, so we have the L, So let's merge the color and the outline and we can delete their coffee. Remember to unselect. Now I can delete the copy. Let's move on to the m, which is just a smaller mouth. Duplicate the M. Smooth a copy either way. Select the m, select all, delete, switch to the brush. I'm going to hit D to get my default colors back in. This, draw this in. That's pretty simple. De-select the copy. Go to the o. The o is an O shape mouth, a little bit of teeth at the top, a little bit of tongue at the bottom. Duplicate that. Move the copy out of the way for reference. The original layer, select all delete, switch to the brush and assuming again for this one. Let's draw this one in. Put in a layer underneath for the color, the shadows at the teeth. Then let's make a little brighter. For the rest of teeth. Di, go back to default and I use the black for the mouth. And again, I'll just sample the tongue color they had before. All right, Let's merge these layers and de-select. You can delete the copy onto the R. The R is very similar to the OS, except that seems to be less of an O shape moment, oval shape. You can do. Duplicate that. Move this over. Select all, delete the brush. Let's zoom in. Hit D to go to default colors. Little bit at the top, a little bit tongue at the bottom. Layer underneath color. Hit D. For the defaults. We're going to sample the the tongue color they used. De-select, merge the outline and the color. Can delete the copy. Now gone to S, which is the teeth together. Similar to the d. Let's duplicate that. Move the copy over. Select the S layer, select all, delete, switch the brush. It D. Let's draw this one in another color or a layer underneath for the color, painting the shadows. And now I'm going to paint in the later part. The same for the bottom row. This good. De-select can merge these. The copy. We're almost done. All we have now is this w stand and oo sound, and these have multiple frames. Let's go ahead and save. 10. mouth part 2: All right, so now we can finish the mouth with the loo sounds. Let's open up the group. And you'll notice the 12. It looks like the differences on the frame too. Just a little bit wider. Let's duplicate the one hitting the to get the move tool and switch to one. Select all. Delete. Switch to the brush, set default colors. Zoom in a little bit, and me to draw the mouth width. For it to get wider. You have some teeth at the top, some tongue at the bottom. Let's add a layer for the color. I'm going to sample the tongue color, merge the outline and the color Control D to de-select. Then we can delete that layer, duplicate layer to turn that off for now. Move this down, select all delete. Really, we should probably use one as a guide. So let's select one. Let's turn the opacity down layer to select hit B for the brush, D for default. We just need to make it a little bit wider. Sometimes I like to break up a line and make it easier to draw. Sometimes it's hard to draw. Straight line all in one go. Mouth is little bit wider. And let's add a layer for color underneath. Can turn the opacity back on. Turn off the visibility. Let's do a color now. Hit D for default. I'm going to select a sample of the red. And I'm going to erase a little bit here on the outline. Give a little more space for the tongue. I hit E. Here we go. That's a little better. Let's go back to B and draw back in. B then D, and draw back in the mouth. Zoom back out. Alright. Merge these two layers. De-select and delete the copy. We have the animation. I think you're supposed to turn the visibility onto the layers. If we could turn it off with the group. Let's go to the, which is basically a circle for the map which is a little bit bigger. So that shouldn't be too hard. Duplicate that. Move the copy. Redraw this one, select all. Delete. Brush. Pretty simple. De-select, delete. We don't need to, this is pretty, pretty easy. We won't duplicate the layers and go through that whole process and just select all, delete. Select the brush. Draw another circle a little bit bigger. Now can turn off the layer one. Let's fill that in and go to Layer three. Let's leave layer two on. Select all, delete, switch back to the brush. Make it just a, oops. Let's make it just a little bit bigger. Turn off to fill it in. Ahead and save that. Let's de-select. Turn turn these back on, and turn off the group. And that's it for the map. We're not gonna worry about the sad mouth. Of course you can add it in if you'd like. And it'd be the same process we used for the regular mouth. Now that we haven't saved, we can go back into character animator and test it out. I think we need to make the neutral visible. Let's make that visible. And let's look at the scene. Let's test this out. And there we go. Wow. Fast. There we go. As you can see, we've got animating and Scott all our original drawing shapes in. If you need to go back in and adjust, it looks like there's something there's a frame leftover. Is go and fix that. There's something they got left behind. Here it is, we forgot to do the one final thing. Let's do the turn off a neutral. And it seems very similar to the whereas just a larger opening, slightly narrower mouth than they do this. Duplicate this. Move the copy. Select all, delete, switch to the brush, Deselect. Zoom in just a load of it. Let's draw in the mouth. Little bit of room to open wider. Add a layer underneath for the color. I'm going to sample the color. Let's erase out a little bit. On the line art. Get a little more room. I didn't draw back in the mouth. Then for the second frame, emerge these the second frame slightly wider. Need to duplicate when you just work off of this one. Select all delete. Let's lower the opacity of the first frame. To frame to select B. Hit B for the brush. And let's draw this in a little bit wider. Don't worry too much about it touching the bottom because this actually stretches down when it animates. And it looks like where I need to sample the color from here. Let's do the color, sample the red. Create a new layer for the color underneath the red first. Then we'll put in the shadow for the teeth, the bright area on the teeth, and then the rest of the mouth. So d, Let's make the tongue a load of a bigger. Select the outline layer, hit E for erase. Paint that painted rest of the tongue back in. Alt. Save that. Merge these two. Is on the group layer off. Save. Turn the neutral back on. The Select, go back to character animator, and go back to the scene. It should update with all our changes. And there we go. That's the that's the bulk of it really now we just need to do the body, the hair, and we'll do some special animations. 11. body: Here we are. Let's keep going and start working on the body. Here we are back in Photoshop and let's turn on their body. And you'll notice that it's broken up into different groups. The right arm, which is then broken up into the arm and the right hand. And that's further broken up into a default flip and a point. And then we have the left arm, then we have the torso, several parts. Then we have pants. Just the pants and the shoes. So let's look at our concept and turn off their body for a second. This is our concept for our body. Will use this as a guide for drawing our puppet. I don't really need the color for right now. I'll just turn that, turn that off the heads in the right position for where we made our new one. So let's go ahead and start on the torso. Let's turn off everything else. Just start off with the torso. You'll notice there are parts for the neck. Shadow right here. This logo shirt. What we're gonna do is just do a neck and the shirt. We don't really need this, Ashley. We kinda know what we need to do just basically the neck and the shirt will turn all that off and just create a new layer. Just to be safe, we'll just, we'll just use their layer to select all delete. We'll draw in our neck. Let's turn the opacity down on the original concept. Switch to the brush. Some reason my D wasn't working by default, so I press this button here to set the defaults. This button right here will flip. Let's draw that in. That'll be the outlier for the neck. It goes to clean it up a little bit. Pressing E for erase. B for the brush. Again, it's a little messy, but it's okay for this one if you want. You can try to clean it up if you'd like. I want this to be a kind of sketchy, so I'm fine with it. Now we need to select our colors. I really use our concept art. Select the shirt color that off, create a new layer underneath for the color. Let's do this little fast. So let's select the paint bucket tool. Here we go. Click it a couple of times. It'll fill in some of those gaps and switch to the brush. You can even go in and add a little more. Which really doesn't do much, I guess, except darken this black outline a little bit. Alright, now let's pain in the neck. Select the net color and go back to this color layer. Let me switch to the mouse. I'll increase the brush size. It can overlap, overlap a little bit because the head will be sitting on top of it anyways, go back here, clean this up just a little bit. Now we can combine these layers. Select them both. I'm gonna hit Control E for emerged. I can delete all these layers. All right, So there's just the torso. Let's go ahead and save that. And now let's look at the pants, which are basically the pants in the feet. Bring up our concept art. I'll just use their layer. Select all. Delete. Switch to the brush, hit D for the defaults. Let's draw these pants. Is I'll draw the feed into one another one. Just create a new layer for the color we use that. Let's bring up our original art. Select the color here. Turn that off. Let's try the paint bucket tool again. And I have it for all layers. So it should pick up this has a border. Otherwise it would just flow into everything. This is our color layer. Great. Click a couple more times, you get it close. And then let's do the shoes just like an M brush. Alt for the color picker. Let's go back to the Paintbrush tool or the paint bucket tool and fill the feet. Alright, I'm gonna hit control D to deselect. I think that's good. That's good enough that we can merge these two layers. Let's go ahead and save this. And let's move on to the right arm. We have the right arm is in a corner like an a pose off this side and I guess a T-Pose, it'd be straight. And a plus is kinda like a little more downs is somewhere between an a and a T-pose. We have this arm section. Then we have the hand section. Let's start with the arm, which is basically this sleeve and this arm right here. Let's look at our concept art. Let's select all delete. Go ahead and delete this layer. Also, I'm going to switch to the brush defaults. Let's draw in the right arm. In that kind of a pose. The character has sleeveless t-shirts. Worry about this leaves. It looks. It looks okay. That's a little bit longer. Actually. Shorten it up just a bit. Now we need to do the hand. They have different different layers here. You can have different animation for the hand. So they have the default, which is the thumb up, and then they have the flip with the thumb down and they have a point with the finger-pointing. We'll start with the default. Select B for the brush. And let's draw the hand. Thumb. I'm using a pretty big brush. Let's just give them two fingers. Then we need to do a flip down. The thumb, the hand. Then we need to do a point with a thumb up and index finger out. I'm going to delete that. Thumb is up. Next point. The index is pointing. Alright. There we go. Let's do some color. Let's see what our original concept was for this. We had the purple skin and then we had these gray gloves. So let's select that purple here. Here's the paint bucket again. We need to turn off that outline. There we go. There we go. That's nice. Then we need to select that gray color. I'm just going to use the Eyedropper. Select that. Let's go back to the paint bucket. Fill. Make sure you don't fill in the line. There's that line right there. There's a must be. That's where I erase before, so it's filling that in. Let's just switch to the brush. Be safe. You know what, I'm messing this up completely. I'm drawing on the arm layer and I should be drawing on the coloring and the handler is let me erase all this. Let's get down to the hand layer. Turn off these other ones. We're going to start with the default. We've got the right color are already. Let's just paint bucket that. Just the brush. Still a little clean up over here on this arm to seems like erase a little more this outline on that layer. There we go. All right, good. Now I just need to continue with the other colors. The default is done. Go to flip. I'll add another layer for the color. Start painting that in. Switch to B. Alright, let's get a point. Turn off visibility for flip, turn on point and the color layer. Let's fill that in. And let's go ahead and merge all these control D to de-select. And there goes the right arm. Now we just need to do the left arm, the character left arm. Obviously, the same process should actually go a little quicker to select all delete, delete. Turn off the hand for now, withdraw on the arm. The brush. Default colors, a pose. Let's paint this in. We can just select from over here. We can't use a fill since we haven't put the hand in and you'll notice it is a little cleaner on this side. But again, this character is going to be, it's going to have this loose sort of sketchy feel. So I'm fine with that. Go ahead and merge these here. Now we'll move on to the hand. Start off with the default. Select all, delete. The brush defaults. And this is the South a thumb up. Thumbs looking a little small. Actually the whole hands looking a little small. Hole. The hole left arm, it looks a little bit longer than the right arm and we fix it up just a little bit. Go in here. Erase this a little bit. You can just grab this hand. Use the move tool, de-select, use the Move tool. Move it over here. Using just the arrow keys to nudge it. Now we can't go back to the brush. Create a layer underneath for the color. Select that color. Fill this. Go ahead and merge that since we're here. Now, go into the flip, which is the thumb down. Select all, delete, de-select, brush, default, do the thumb down. Let's create a layer for the color. Select from over here. Good, merge these. Now we're onto the point and turn that one off. Select all, delete, de-select brush. Default. Smaller brush. This is the point. Will have the thumb up, finger-pointing forward. The other finger. Then create a layer for the color. Select from over here. And just paint that in. Alright, let's merge that. Go ahead and save. Now, let's turn on the default for both. The left hand, the right hand turn on default. There we go. This is pretty much our whole puppet of this M. Just need to add the hair. But so far we have the head and the body. Pure wanted to go ahead and save it. And let's flip back to character animator and you can test it out. And there's our body. Hey, what's up? Here's our puppet so far, pretty cool. And all that's left now is to add the hair and then to fine tune the animations. 12. hair: Alright, so now for the hair, you've got these couple pieces up here, and what we're gonna do is draw them as separate clumps. So then they can move. With the physics simulation. We'll try to simplify. Well, let's just make it three clumps. All right, so let's look at our puppet. Turn off the concept and the blank. We'll go up to the head, close them out for now. Close the other groups. We have this face background. And what we're gonna do is create. So for the hair, what we're gonna do is create an entirely new layer. Let's call this one here. Under blank. You know what, since we have so many strands is create a group. I'll call this here. Makes sure that layer is in there. I'll call this clump one. All right, so let's switch to the brush Defaults. All right, so let's start by drawing the middle clump. I'm going to make them kind of like little raindrops. And then it's created a layer in any for the color parameter concept and select that green. It's also the same green for the shoes. You could also just select it from there and paint that in. And then let's add another layer for clump to do. Slightly different shape. And hit D for default. Make it a little bit elongated. All right, Let's create our color layer. Select. Fill that in. This habit. Let's have it overlap a little bit. We'll fix the outline defaults. Here we go. This one more. Let's draw that in. Then create other layer. Select that. There we go. The hair is done. Let's merge all these puppets. Pretty much done if you'd like, you can go in and find tuner. You can put in some shading, adjust the colors, redraw the lines, work this as much as you can, but you could puppet, It's more or less done now. The next step is just to fine tune the animation in character animator. For now, let's save. Let's go back to the scene and test them out. Eight, There we go. 13. animating the hair: All right, so now what we want to do is create this query short little test animation. And that way we can have a tryout our puppet. So I'm going to go back to our scene and record. I will make sure your your puppet is selected for the record. Delete that. Let's try this again. Let's look at the timeline back. And let's hit record. Hello everybody. Testing, testing. 123, fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. All right. We have our text here. If you play it. So hello everybody. You'll see that it animated. What we want to do now is go timeline. Then you want to compute head movement from speech. What this is going to do is it's going to animate the head based on your speech. Now let's play it. And you should see the head move. So hello everybody. Testing, testing. 123. Fabulous, Fabulous, fabulous. It's pretty nice. Only thing I'd like to do is I want the hair to move a little bit. What I'd like is for the hair to respond to physics, I want to kind of sway a little bit. Alright, so let's try to get these individual clumps of hair to sway on their own. Let's go to the rig. First thing we need to do is go back and Photoshop actually will take this hair group and put it with the head group. That way all the hair moves with the head. So go ahead and save that. Go back to character animator. And now our hair, it's part of the head group, will first select the first clump and turn on this crown to it moves independently. Then we'll go to this right here, the dangle tool. I'm going to click right here at the end. And then we're going to move this origin down to the base right here. We'll do the same thing for clump number to turn on the crown, use the dangle tool. Press that on the end and move the origin down. Go to clump three. Turn on the crown. Use a dangle tool again. We'll move this down here. Let's go ahead and save. Go back to the record and see how this looks. Now you'll see the hair kind of sway as the head moves. Testing. You can have jewelry, fabulous, fabulous, fabulous tail, alright. Wherever you'd like. That responds to physics. And you can adjust the physics over here. We have this dangle under physics. Under the Properties. You can adjust just a squashing this, the stiffness and the damping. Let's play with that. Turn a stiffness down, squashing up. Keep the damping low. Now you got some weird testing. 123. So we'd have to clean up the head loss. Alright, use the settings because it's moving a lot. And we've seen these loops and spots. But for now we can click this x and set it back to the defaults. I'm okay with it just having a little bit this way. 14. rig adjustments: It's left elbow right about there, and the wrist right about there. Let's draw this bone here. Are this thick and I will draw stick there. That's good. Torso towards it looks fine. The pants are fine. Just to show you what these fixed sticks will do. Let's delete one, save it, and we'll go back to record. Watch what happens. Notice that this leg is stuck. This forward is floating. Now, let's go back and fix that scratching stick. Right here. Make sure you have the body selected. And then over here under the tags, make sure you hit fixed. And I'll save that. Go back to our scene. Now, you'll see that the feet stay in place. The only thing other thing I noticed is that we need to fix these shoulder points. So it's under the body, the right shoulder. Left shoulder. Go and save that. Back to record. Now, pick up the hands. You should be able to move them about draggable. And you'll see it's kinda messy. So let's, let's tweak that a little bit. Most of your problem when we move them up, probably the best thing to do would be to to draw the rest of the shoulder in Photoshop. Let's go ahead and do that. Skirt of the body. The arm. Let's turn off torso just so we can see the end of the arm switch to the brush, and this is the left arm. So on this side, select my default colors. Let's just draw that in. Select this. The colors. It looks nice I worked for me. All right, let's go and do the right arm. Same thing. The rest of the arm. Switch the default colors. Clean up this a little bit. It looks like we need to clean up left arm also. It's always a little bit of back and forth. Let's part of the process. Let's go ahead and save that. Go back into character animator. Oops, looks like we turned off. Got to turn the shirt back on. Torso, back on. Back to character animator. Little messy. When we get in here, it's fine. There we go. Now that the arms can animate. You can set it up to use the camera. You can use a body tracker. 15. animating Triggers: And now let's have a look at some of the triggers. So if we have our go back to our rig right here and we have a trigger is over here. And what these are are those layers where you can select one at a time to animate the wellness group right here, call this swap set. What this means is only one trigger in the swap set will be shown at a time. So you can either do the default, the flip or the point. We didn't use them out. And then we have all the lids right here. These are all the keys you can use to activate the trigger. So if we go back to record vector a scene, if you hit Generate controls, now we have controls. We can see everything. Or you can just use his triggers menu. Let's test out somebody's. So we have one. Looks like we have a little problem here. Probably one of the layers is turned off. So let's look here. The right-hand is fine. So here's the problem. It looks like over here, under these options for the trigger is not set the default for some reason, perhaps when we were making the new layers that it lost that setting. So let's make sure you set that to default. And it seemed like the left-hand was already set the defaults, I shouldn't be a problem. And let's go back to our scene. We go, if you hit one, it'll flip. You hit two points. And if you click it again, it just goes back to default. And we have three, is four, the other hand flips. And for points, We're not using the side mouth. We do hit six. It does the open the open lids. We hit seven. Does the blank. Pretty cool. Now what we're gonna do is record somebody's custom animations. Let's turn the mic off for now. Since we already have our audio recorded. And sit this record button and turn this off because we already have the lip-sync done. We're going to record all of these other ones, the limb IK and the triggers. Let's start with the limbs first. So we'll do a pass record. Will move the arms. Move this other arm. I'm going to stop that. Now we have the arms recorded. Now we can do another pass and we'll do we'll do some hand gestures. Record, will flip the hand point. The other hand point. This is recorded and you can see the separate layers. You have these triggers. Layer right here, the fate, the lip-sync, the face, and the drag or the last one we'll do is do some animation. I hit Record again. Wide eyes. We did the blink. Stop. There you go. Got their hands animated. We've got the lip-sync, got the hair swaying just a little bit. We have the r's animating. Pretty cool. So now you've got your own character. If you want, you can record your own audio, you can do, you can use the mic, you can use the webcam. 16. eye gaze: I want to show you this here for the Eyegaze. We have over here on the puppet properties, Eyegaze. You twirl that open. You have different ways to control the Eyegaze. You have a mouse and touch him point. It's already set up the camera input. I don't have my camera on right now, but if you did, it would track your eye movement. Let me turn it off, but you can also use mouse and touch. So whereby I click, pupils will follow and figure out a keyword input. You can use the arrow keys to move the pupils. So let's go ahead and record some pupil movement. I think it adds a little bit more. Realize that when you have the pupils moving, also, watch that. 17. custom trigger: So far we've been working with triggers and behaviors that were already set up on the blank puppet. What if you want to create your own custom triggers? Well, let's, let's do that. I have an idea. I'd like to turn this shirt into a skeleton. So we'll add a trigger to that. But first we need to go into Photoshop and create the artwork. So here we are back in Photoshop. What we want to do first is create a layer that's going to be this new trigger. It's gonna be on top of this torso. I'm gonna create a new layer, and let's select that. I'm going to fill it in with black. So hit X to reverse the colors and then Alt Backspace to fill. So now we have a black shirt and let's create another layer to draw the skeleton on. And I'm going to select my brush and switch back to white. And let's draw this skeleton. This is what I mean, kind of like a Halloween thing. That's it. Pretty simple. And I drew it on a separate layer just in case I messed up and it would be easier to fix than if I had it all drawn together. But now that it's done, we can go ahead and merge these layers. Name that. Go ahead and save that. And we'll turn it off by default. And now we'll go back to character animator and let's go to the rig. This fine torso. Turn the visibility off on that. To create a trigger. What we can do is we can either go over here and hit Create Trigger is actually several ways to do it. Or we could drag the layer over here to the Triggers panel. It'll create a trigger. And then we need to set a key for it. I'm just going to hit S. If we hit S, it will show this layer. And since it's sitting on top of the other t-shirt, don't really need to worry about the visibility of the layer underneath. Normally we might have to do a swap set, which is this right here. We're only one of the triggers are shown at a time. Shouldn't really matter. We have this other option here, this will latch. And what last does it is it acts like a toggle, so if you press the key, it turns it on and turn off. You have to press again, otherwise you'd have to hold it down to keep it active. So let's go back to the scene. And if I press S because our shirt some reason the latch didn't stay. So let me make sure I hit latch here and there we go up. I hit S, turns it off and on. We have a custom trigger. Let's record that animation. So we have our triggers being recorded. Let's go ahead and record. Good and play that back. You'll see it right here on this layer. Not perfect. There's a little bit of those, a little bit of gap here underneath the arm. And we can go ahead and fix that in Photoshop. We need to do is probably just turn off the arms. Turn that layer back on. Yes. And redraw this back-end. Maybe draw that and that weight back into. Alright, there we go, ahead and save that. And if we go back to character animator, the layer should update. And we don't need to re-record the animation. We do need to turn the arms back on that. Save. All right. 18. swap set: For our final customization, we will add to a swap set. So right now the hands have default flip and a point. What if we want to add a hand animation? First, we need to draw it in Photoshop. We'll go to the right hand. Let's create a new group. And we're gonna call this. I don't know if people still do this anymore, but it used to be a thing back in the day. Turn off the default, and it's basically going to be the thumb and the pinky finger out and the other finger in. Let's draw that. It looks kind of weird. Let's try that again. Probably need exaggerate the thumb load a bit and then exaggerate the pinky. It looks kinda weird with only the three fingers put. It'll be weird. Let's go over those lines a little bit. Then we need to fill in the background color. So let's create a new layer. I will just select from the other glove. Now we can merge the layers. Let's go over to the left hand, me the same thing. The left arm. Oh, left arm and left hand. Some layers. And we'll turn off the default. And let's go ahead and draw this in d for default colors. Try to exaggerate that. Download a good, Bring that finger. Curls. This looks weird, but that's okay. Now let's put in the color. Go ahead and merge these. Turn these off, turn back on the default. Let's go back to character animator. So let's go to the rig. We need to do now is drag these layers onto ours flop sets. We have this hanging loose here, and we'll drag that to the right-hand swap set. 23. All the numbers have been taken up, so we're gonna have to renumber everything. Let's not worry about that just yet. We'll bring the left hand to the left hand trigger and then this renumber these. So there's gonna be 3456, then we have to number it, renumber these also, there'll be seven. We're not using the sad actually. We can probably actually, we can take that out of the swap set. You can hit delete, delete it from the swap set, since we're not using the sad mouth. And so now we have 1233 is gonna be a hang loose and six gonna be hang loose on the left-hand. Let's try this out. So there's three. There are six. We should probably make these latches. Make that a latch. Awesome. There we go. Now you can 123. So now you can switch between four different hand positions. 19. properties and outro: I'd like to show you a couple of other features. But we're not gonna do any anything new. But this is just in case you want to explore a little bit deeper. We have all these properties over here. And you can sit what's going to be recorded. And then you have all these properties here where you can adjust how the behaviors act. For the face. We have all of these features. We have MI K, we have lip-sync, the jaw movement. We have physics, which we went over regarding the dangle. We have transform, which is moving. Scaling is also opacity and rotation. Then we have these triggers based on what we've covered in this class, should be able to make your own original puppet. You should be able to animate and recorded. Should be able to live sync it and create some custom animations. There's a lot more in character animator, but I feel like this is a good start for you to be able to create your own characters. And now you can make your own animations. You can start making your own show. Actually. Good luck with everything. Look forward to seeing what you can make.