From Character Animator to Animate

[Jon Chambers]

I love the lip sync feature of Character Animator, but I prefer to animate bodies in Animate. No problem, just make the head in Character Animator, add it to Animate (with background transparency) over the body. Done.

Or not. It's possible to export it with transparency to After Effects. From there, After Effects is very versatile, so I can make it into any file type imaginable!

Which file types (with transparency) does Adobe Animate open? Is there another way of getting my lip sync data across?

[Jon Chambers · Accepted solution]

I had a think, and here's the best idea I have so far:

I will animate the body with some tracking references for the head to follow above the neck. Xs or squares should work, but I'll try the other if the first doesn't. From there, I can animate the body, and have the head automatically follow using After Effects tracking.

It's slow, CPU intensive, less than perfect, and not what the programs were designed to do, but it's the best workflow idea so far. I'll mark this as "correct answer" in 48 hours unless someone can top it.