Adobe Character Animator Camera Not Working

[Nhyiraba Valentin]

Hiim having trouble fixing my camera for character animator, when ever im trying to use character animator the voice recording works but my came doesn't show, my camera is on but it doesn't show me on the screen it only says "waiting for camera". I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and checking if it was up to date, and Im wanted to know if theirs way to fix this problem with the camrea for a pc/ windows.

3) Make sure your camera is plugged directly into your PC and not into a USB hub. Sometimes hubs don't provide enough power to cameras, or limit the USB speed. Also if you have any high-speed USB plugs (blue) on your computer we recommend using those.

I have a similar issue, but only with the Characterizer. I have an old Logitech webcam that works fine in Character animator, but when I switch to Characterizer I see the camera feed for a half second or so, then it switches toa "waiting for camera" message. The audio meter seems to be recieving signal though. Last night it would then lockup and I'd have to force Character Animator to shut down.

Today I purchased a cheap webcam from Walmart (ONN house brand) in the hopes that it would work. It still does basically the same thing, except it doesn't lock up - just never gets access to the camera. I've also tried using a seperate audio input as there were some suggestions that audio sampling ability could be the issue, but no difference.

You say you've tested an extensive range of cameras, is that list available? I don't want to keep buying and returning cameras till I get lucky.

Do you have any special webcam drivers installed? Which ones? Note that some of the "virtual webcam" drivers break things with the Mac. A few can disturb the entire camera subsystem when installed, even if you aren't using them.

A common issue for newcomers in the Character Animator (Ch) forums is getting eyes to work correctly. They are a bit finicky, but I find once most people get the first puppet right, the rest are not a problem.

The following shows the hierarchy for one of my puppets as reference. You can vary this pattern in a few ways I mention later. On the left is the artwork hierarchy, on the right is the Ch puppet hierarchy.

When debugging a puppet, it is worth expanding the full hierarchy of the puppet and clicking on every layer, one by one, and checking the tags for that layer. It may seem painful, but most puppets can be done in a minute or two.

Strange things can happen sometimes if the layers are not directly under the eye. E.g. blinking might not work as expected, it may have trouble moving eyelids, etc. My advice is always put the sublayers directly under the eye layer, not nested somewhere deeper in the hierarchy.

The order of layers is important as they control what is displayed in front and behind. For example, in this puppet I put the eyebrows in front of (above) the hair to make them more visible. Other puppets I put the eyebrows lower down (behind the hair fringe). I tend to always put eyebrows above the eyes.

If I see a puppet that is getting distorted in strange ways, I immediately review the independence settings. If layers are independent, any stretching or distortion of the parent does not affect the child, and vice versa. For example, if the eyebrows of a puppet are not independent, then when Ch moves the eyebrows it will distort the face around the eyebrows. The same is true of the eyes, eyelids, and pupil. There are times where this is desirable, but my default starting position is to make many of these layers independent so they can moved without distorting the head.

Same raised eyebrows again, but with independence turned off for the eyebrows. See how the eyes (which I still have independent) are unaffected, but the rest of the face, hair, and eyebrow shape are strangely distorted?

The following shows some strange distortions of the eye shape that can be caused by not using a Blink layer. The Blink layer is not mandatory. Some puppet eye designs are fine without a blink layer, some are not.

Also be careful if you have hidden groups inside the eyes before cloning them. The way I make a copy and reflect and move the eyes sometimes is not applied to the hidden sublayers, resulting in some of the eye parts being left on the wrong side of the face. (See the note later on emotions and triggers.)

Personally, I generally use Illustrator on the theory that vector artwork scales better. For example, I can do fully body shots or zoom in on eyes without pixelization. However, some Illustrator features are not supported by Ch such as clipping masks.

You can click on the mesh icon in the rigger or scene view window to check for unexpected stray objects in the artwork. This can happen when something was included in the wrong layer. Unconnected objects in a layer tend to cause Ch to fall back to using a yellow rectangle mesh. (This is rarely a problem for eyes if everything is independent.)

There are also Eye Gaze and Face behaviors that may be relevant. Eyebrow strength controls how far the eyebrows will move from the camera. Here I have them turned on for the demos, but I frequently turn them off and use triggers as the camera can cause jitters in the eyebrows during recordings. So I often set the Eyebrow Strength to zero or something pretty small.

For Eye Gaze, if Snap Eye Gaze is off (which allows the puppet to look at more than N, NW, W, SW etc directions), then I turn off Camera Input and turn on the Mouse instead. The camera causes a slight jitter even when you keep your eyes looking perfectly still.

In a nutshell, the problem was stray pixels in both the eye pupil and eye pupil range layers. The end result I think was the pupil did not fit within the pupil range. In the above example, the problem was solved by deleting all the stray pixels.

In another puppet, a similar problem occurred using Illustrator. The common aspect seems that the pupil was a little taller than the pupil range (or very close), which resulted in one of the eyes going backwards like above. The solution is to create a separate transparent layer for pupil range as described above, possibly with the clipping mask applied as well (also as described above).

You have mentioned that the camera does not allow the eyebrows to stay in the desired position when they are raised or lowered, which is my experience also. As an alternative you have displayed an Ai file with four versions of the eyebrow. These avoid the jitters of the camera but they are presumably staccato whereas with the camera at least there is a smooth (though jittery) transition from one position to the other. Is there any compromise between these two options?

Thank you for your reply to my question about blinking. I tried to click on like and helpful but the system did not respond.

You recommend auto blink which I would prefer to use. However, even though the default is 30 blinks per minute it happens a lot slower than every two seconds and sometimes blinks two or three times in one go. Did you ever have this problem?

Hello Alan! I was wondering if you happen to know the best resources to learn character animator? I am having quite a lot of trouble. If you could point me in the correct direction that would be great.

I have a problem with my characters left pupil. Right is moving just fine when im using mouse to control it, but the left one is moving like the direct opposite I am moving my mouse, also it is weird in other ways too (going out of the pupil range and so on). But they both seem to be set correct. Maybe someone knows a fix? ?

I just bought a new laptop and the camera i working, but not in Character animator, unfortunately. It has worked on the two other laptops I have had it on before. It says that it is waiting for camera, not fully supported. Is there anything I can do to fix this, or do I have to buy a new external camera?

I restarted and did everything I know to try to get it to show an image. It works in any other program and the mic from the camera worked just fine with in CH. I reverted to version 2.0 and it works fine. Thanks for all your hard work.

I am having an issue with the web camera not being detected. I have the Character Animator CC 2018 version loaded and the camera works all fine. It loads up and the characters respond to the face movement.

But on the Character Animator CC 2019 version I get this error after "selected camera is unavailable". I select the burger menu and the camera name is displayed correctly and is selected. For reference i have attached 2 screenshots of the error.

Thank you so much for the respond. I have checked with the old version of Adobe Character Creator CC 2018 and the camera works fine. I have also checked the web cam using the default windows video and that also loads the video fine.

Only with the new version of Adobe Character Creator CC 2019 only this happens. Do you know if there is any way to force the camera or will there be any coding in the program that may need to be granted access to the camera? I have included a picture of it working fine on Adobe Character Creator CC 2018.

Character Animator CC 2019 has different camera detection than the CC 2018 version. If the Windows 10 Camera app is working and if there are no other applications using the webcam on your machine, we'd need to investigate and try to reproduce the issue with the Lifecam HD-3000 webcam on our side. We've ordered that webcam and are waiting for it to arrive. We'll update this forum thread as soon as we have additional information. Thanks for your patience.

Which version of Windows 10 are you using? If you right-click the Start button on the taskbar and choose System, then scroll down to the Version information, does it show Version 1803 or some older version?

Nothing to do with CA: if u r using chrome or edge or any folk, check the autorisations because still not taking images the webcam is used by the browser.

Or you give out the authorisation or you block it through the security program you could have in your computer.

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