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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1299064
as the expanding the many other uses these versatile virtual entities that came about before these homebound days. August’s beta release of the program adds a bunch of features that help to give characters more lifelike actions (or inactions, as the case may be) with a lot less work for their creators. One of the best is Speech-Aware Animation, an outgrowth of Project SweetTalk that was previewed at last year’s Adobe MAX. At its most basic, it will intelligently apply head and eyebrow movements based on speech inputs. And these aren’t just random movements. Adobe Researcher Dingzeyu Li led a team built a model that scanned thousands of hours of YouTube video the learn how those words and movements combine in the real world (or, at least, the YouTube version of the real world) to create puppet movement that is natural and believable. Limb Inverse Kinematics (IK) has been part of Character Animator’s arm movement toolbox for some time now. Limb IK is now propagating through the rest of the puppet’s body legs bend and the body tilts more naturally without a lot of extra work. There’s also a new option to pin a character’s feet so they don’t move even when the rest of the body does. As you could do with your face, you can now assign a Rest Pose to the rest of the figure. It will return there smoothly and naturally. The timeline is adding more features to help keep it organized, similar to those found in Premiere Pro and After Effects. It’s also added a unique timeline filtering feature to let you focus on certain puppets, scenes, or keyframes. It also adds Layer Sequencing, a very useful form of automation that originated in After Effects for easily manipulating the timing through multiple layers.