2023-3-4 Re-rigging Brad
The beautiful thing about this software is that updates to characters are very easy to make. While re-watching some of the scenes that I’ve made so far for Episode 1 (“Highly Energized Lines”), I noticed that the characters weren’t as expressive as human actors. Therefore, all I needed to do was update the Photoshop file to include additional mouth sets. In addition to a default mouth set of normal conversation, there is now a sad mouth talking and also a yelling mouth when needed for shouting or speaking angrily.
Then, once updates are made to the graphic file, it simply replaces the existing Photoshop file that is already rigged in Character Animator. Granted, a bit of time needs to be spent re-rigging the mouth sets, and in this case re-rigging for additional eye lid expressions in a new swap set, along with additional hand gestures, the character can come to life in new ways.
A tip for those who use Character Animator’s head turn behavior: plan on not being able to easily change a gesture in a swap set that is attached to the head, like a mouth expression or an eye lid expression. This is because there are 5 duplicate recordings for each of those triggers (right profile, right quarter, frontal, left quarter, and left profile). It’s easy to switch one hand gesture to another in the timeline after a recording because there is only one recording, not 5.
Triggers are easily changeable though, so trial and error is fine when rigging new characters.