Character Animator imports layered
Adobe Photoshop and
Adobe Illustrator documents into
puppets which have
behaviors applied to them. The
puppets are then placed into a
scene, which can be viewed in the Scene panel and Timeline panel. Rigging is set up in the Puppet panel, though basic
rigging is fully automatic based on specific layer names like
Right Eyebrow and
Smile. Properties of selected elements can be examined and changed in the Properties panel, including behavior parameters. Live inputs include a webcam (for face-tracking), microphone (for live lip sync), keyboard (for triggering layers to hide/show), and mouse (for warping specific
handles). Final output of a scene can be exported to a sequence of
PNG files and a
WAV file, or any video format supported by
Adobe Media Encoder. Live output can be sent to other applications running on the same machine via the Syphon protocol (Mac only) or Adobe Mercury Transmit on both Mac and Windows. Scenes can also be dropped directly into
After Effects and
Premiere Pro, using Dynamic Link to avoid rendering. == History ==