Character "jumps" when state is changed

Aug 30, 2012

I'm enjoying using the various expressions and poses for illustrated characters, but I've come across something that's a minor (ok - not so minor) irritation.  On a single layer I have a character listen, speak and then listen again.  I've set triggers to change from neutral to talking when one audio clip ends and then back to neutral when the next clip ends.  Unfortunately on playback,  when the character is supposed to change back to neutral, the entire character jumps to the right a little.  The expression does change, but the move is distracting. Any thoughts on how to reposition the final state so that it's back where it needs to be?

13 Replies
Joshua Taylor

Hi all,

I'm experiencing the same issue as Joyce, would it be possible to have the solution posted? In my case it's a mouseover trigger which causes the character's expression to change. I've attached images (heavily censored) to illustrate this. It might not be incredibly obvious from the screenshots, but the character puts on about 15 pounds and moves half a foot to the right.

Joshua Taylor

Thanks Peter, Joyce, and Christine for your help!

I was able to resolve my issue. I went into the "States" menu as Joyce had suggested, but I had trouble playing around with the sizing to get the two different states to be equal (still not sure why the one increased in size, I don't think it was anything I did, but who knows!).

What I did in the end was pretty simple- I had two states, a "Normal" and an "Alarmed", so I deleted the "Alarmed" one, selected the "Normal" one again and clicked "Duplicate" and renamed the copy to "Alarmed". This provided me with a scaled character with the correct expression, and best of all all my existing state changes were preserved.

Hopefully that's clear enough, and helps anyone who might experience a similar issue in the future.

Sara Ward

Joshua Taylor said:

[redacted]

What I did in the end was pretty simple- I had two states, a "Normal" and an "Alarmed", so I deleted the "Alarmed" one, selected the "Normal" one again and clicked "Duplicate" and renamed the copy to "Alarmed". This provided me with a scaled character with the correct expression, and best of all all my existing state changes were preserved.

 

I experienced the same issue and the "duplicate" solution worked. Thank you!
Darlene Atkinson

Joshua Taylor said:

Thanks Peter, Joyce, and Christine for your help!

I was able to resolve my issue. I went into the "States" menu as Joyce had suggested, but I had trouble playing around with the sizing to get the two different states to be equal (still not sure why the one increased in size, I don't think it was anything I did, but who knows!).

What I did in the end was pretty simple- I had two states, a "Normal" and an "Alarmed", so I deleted the "Alarmed" one, selected the "Normal" one again and clicked "Duplicate" and renamed the copy to "Alarmed". This provided me with a scaled character with the correct expression, and best of all all my existing state changes were preserved.

Hopefully that's clear enough, and helps anyone who might experience a similar issue in the future.


I was having the same problem yesterday also! Thanks for the help above. It worked.

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