Organizing dragger handle movements

[jonnymackjackson]

I'm trying to create a dancing character by duplicating dragger handle movements for repeated actions (choreography). The problem is that because you can't move a recorded behavior "clip" (as one might do in Premiere, for instance), as I add more movements and duplicate them, there ends up being a ton of "tracks" making it really difficult to find the clip(s) to duplicate and/or move. Is there a way to make it easier to organize recorded behaviors (if not, I assume it's in the works)? Or maybe there's a more efficient way to make a dancing character?

[oksamurai]

Currently no - the best you can do is twirl stuff up so it becomes a little more manageable. But we currently work a lot more like After Effects than we do Premiere. The only other workaround is to not duplicate and just do the whole performance on a single track - but I can understand why you'd want to duplicate/repeat the same moves.

This is something we'd like to improve for the future. You'll notice the viseme editor in the latest version is the first time that multiple things can appear on the same track - it's not too hard to imagine this kind of thing happening more in the future with more behaviors.

[ElectricElephant2001]

Hey there!

​I am working with a character that is a dog, and walks like a dog. I saw how you managed the walking cycles in the live video you did from Seattle, but I noticed something;

​When you record, your timeline looks so much easier to handle than mine, like this multiple things on the same track you speak of? Mine has a take bar for every single drag handle, creating a bit of a chatoic  environment when I want to go to a new "stage"

How do you use multiple draggers in your video from Seattle, record, and end up with one, clean viseme in the timeline? It would help out so much!

[oksamurai]

That was old UI, and before we had the Walk behavior! For this sort of thing now we definitely recommend Walk. This video should help with a multi-limbed dog type character: Character Animator Tips & Tricks (June 2017) - YouTube

[ElectricElephant2001]

Ha ha! I thought that was gonna be the case. Oh well. However, I did rig the character in a similar way you did in the video, by adding walk behaviors to the limbs. I am dumbfounded at how awesome it looks.

[chrisn14887705]

You could record a movement, only make the body parts visible that you're using, export it as a png sequence and import it again to use it as cycle layers. Then you could use keyboard triggers, should be much more organized than duplicating stuff a lot.