What is Adobe Character Animator
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What is Adobe Character Animator

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by Chris Smith
What is Adobe Character Animator

Adobe has announced a new app to create animations, which is available as preview version. The new product is Adobe Character Animator, and will be available as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe has a history of providing animation tools, with existing animation tools such as Flash, After Effects, and Edge Animate. Adobe Character Animator is different from these existing tools. As with these other tools, artwork and images from Illustrator and Photoshop can be imported and animated. The difference is the process by which Adobe Character Animator creates animations from these images. It uses the web camera and microphone from a computer to mimic facial expressions and coordinate mouth movements on the animation to those by the user in front of the camera and on the microphone.

Subscribers to the Creative Cloud will have access to Adobe Character Animator along with the existing applications that are part of the subscriptions.  It is installed as part of After Effects and it can also be accessed from within After Effects.

The face tracking technology used by Adobe Character Animator has also been integrated directly into After Effects as well. The next version of After Effects will track faces in camera shots and can be used to create masks for isolating faces or generating control points for effects around all facial features.

Because control points for effects can be easily added to facial features, it is now easier to apply effects and layers to individual parts of the face with great precision. These new capabilities make After Effects use for the application of digital makeup both easier and faster.

While individual courses for Adobe Character Animator are not likely to be needed for users wanting to work with this new tool, the face tracking capabilities will be added into After Effects training courses once the next version is released and gains more widespread use.

About the author

Christopher Smith is president of American Graphics Institute. He is the co-author of Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies and more than 10 other books on design and digital publishing. He served as publisher and editor of the Digital Classroom book series, which has sold more than one million books on topics relating to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud apps. At American Graphics Institute, he provides strategic technology consulting to marketing professionals, publishers designers, and large technology companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and HP. An expert on web analytics and digital marketing, he also delivers Google Analytics classes along with workshops on digital marketing topics. Christopher did his undergraduate studies the at the University of Minnesota, and then worked for Quark, Inc. prior to joining American Graphics Institute where he has worked for more than 20 years.