From the course: Using Character Animator in Production

Using the exercise files - Character Animator Tutorial

From the course: Using Character Animator in Production

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Using the exercise files

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- The best way to get started with Character Animator is to work with existing and rigged puppets and Adobe has lots of them for you. Adobe has many sample puppets you can use as exercise files as you work through this course. They openly state that many of their puppets are free to use. And they update the samples as they improve the software. So let's take a look at where all these really cool free puppets are. Well, over here, if you look at your start tab. Click on that and you'll see four puppets that are free to download. And you can download either the Photoshop or the Illustrator version of any one of them or you can click on the puppet themselves on the picture. When you do, it'll download and open up in Photoshop so you can edit as much as you want in here. Re-draw any layer that you want. One thing I would recommend however, is go to the bottom in the lowest layer, here, instructional background guide. Delete it. Don't just make it invisible, but actually delete it. 'Cause it could affect the way your puppet moves if you have any extraneous elements whatsoever. It also created a new scene and put your puppet in. And the puppet's already rigged and it's already working. Completely. So you can go in and add whatever other kind of rigging you want and work with that puppet instantly. But four puppets might not be enough. Although they are great, if you look down below, it describes what are in them. Like, expressive face and drag-able arms for Chloe, head turns and breathing for the windigo monster, and the WalkBot, a robot that can walk. But there's a lot more. If you click on the see more, Adobe has a website with lots more puppets for you. You can download any one of these, and again, they describe what's in them. Dojo Joe is great with the cycle layers of fire. And there's different pieces of gravity. They even have a completely blank template for both Photoshop and Illustrator that just lays out all the layers exactly the way they should be done and you can just fill in with your own artwork. And there's hand-drawn mouths and there's clay mouths. There's lots of different options here. Now, once you download a puppet or if you create your own, they're very easy to use. You simply just drag your Photoshop file or Illustrator file into your project window over here on the top left. You'll see a little icon next to it that pops up. And let's start a new scene. So we'll do control or command N or just do the scene dropdown and select new scene. Here's our new scene. I'll double click on it to open it up. You'll see that it gives you a blank scene. The puppet we just downloaded, blank face, if I want to bring him into this new scene, I literally just drag it in. And there he is and he's already synced with me. So go ahead and download a few sample puppets now and play along with this course.

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