Leeta is a new Adobe Character Animator puppet
that I recently made, and she’s free for
anyone to download and use however you want
-- the link is in the video description below.
While the underlying artwork is a relatively
primitive collection of simple shapes, there’s
a lot going on behind the scenes to help bring
her to life.
In this video we’re going to walk through
3 advanced Character Animator rigging concepts
that you can apply to your own characters.
First off is Leeta’s hair.
There’s a nice bounce to it, which helps
add some vibrance to the character.
But if you go into the Controls panel, you’ll
see there’s a slider there to change the
length of her hair as well.
Leeta actually has four groups inside her
that contain groups of independent hair strands
-- there are 25 individual hair layers in
all.
Each strand is set up like you normally would
for dangling objects -- move the green origin
dot to the root, and place a Dangle handle
at the opposite tip.
Then, I deleted the main Physics behavior
that gets added to the puppet when you first
import it, and instead added Physics behaviors
to each hair group.
When you get rid of the global behavior and
isolate behaviors on individual elements,
you can give them each their own set of controls.
By default, you’ll notice gravity is facing
straight down, because...well, that’s how
gravity normally works.
But for her right and left top hair groups,
I don’t want them to be so droopy and weighed
down.
So I can actually turn the gravity direction
to the sides instead, which is basically the
cartoon equivalent of hairspray.
It still has some bounce and weight to it,
but the revised gravity is keeping it from
flopping down too low.
A nice side effect of this is that it gives
you several parameter controls.
So to do the hair length slider, I dragged
each of the four Stiffness parameters, adjusted
their min and max values, and then selected
them all and grouped them to make one master
control.
Now I can control all 4 groups at once, each
with different rates, so the bangs in the
front change much less than background hair.
Without blending modes or clipping masks,
Leeta feels a lot more dull and flat.
The moving shadows on her face and body are
missing, and she doesn’t have the more tangible
paper texturing.
So all I did was find this nice image of a
watercolor paper texture and put it directly
above the group or layer I wanted to affect.
I then set the blending mode to Overlay so
the texture would blend into the layers behind
it.
I did this three times for each of the three
main groups - the head, the body, and the
background hair.
Then I just went to Puppet > Create Clipping
Mask.
This limits the top texturing to the shape
of the layer or group directly below it.
The same technique was done with the shadows
on the face and body -- you’ll notice the
actual shadow layers extend much farther than
the face and body, and that’s because in
the next step we’re going to have them move
as you move your head, so you need some extra
buffer room where the shadows will cover more
of the character.
But it’s exactly the same as what we did
for the texture -- put the shadow layer directly
above the group or layer you want it to be
confined to, and do Puppet > Create Clipping
Mask.
Part of the appeal of Leeta is her sense of
dimension.
Her facial features aren’t nailed down to
her face, but instead move at slightly different
rates.
Sliding shadows are cast over her face and
shirt.
And the ears seem to move the opposite way,
sometimes becoming partially hidden behind
the head.
This is a concept called parallax, and it
just means that things closer to your field
of view move differently than things that
are further away.
Character Animator has a Parallax Strength
parameter in the Face behavior that controls
the eyes and nose.
So I started by setting this to 400%, which
leads to a pretty dramatic effect.
But you can brute force some more parallax
by adding more Face behaviors and Head tags.
So for her freckles, I put them in their own
independent group, tagged them as a Head,
and added an extra Face behavior to them.
Then I adjusted the parameters until I liked
the quality of motion that I was seeing.
I repeated this 5 more times with the mouth,
the two shadows, and the two ears.
To get the ears moving in the opposite way
of my head position, I set each of their Position
Strengths to -350%.
When you move all of these elements together
at the same time with your head motions, it
creates a nice parallax effect and helps the
character feel less like a flat Photoshop
file and more like a living animated persona.
Anyway, that’s a quick look at Leeta.
Feel free to download her and use her in your
own creations, or dig deep into Rig mode to
see exactly how everything works behind the
scenes.
As always, please share anything you make
on social media with #CharacterAnimator, and
if you need help the best place for support
is the official Character Animator forums.
Thanks for watching, and have fun.
