Stopping walking & speaking in Debut

[Animatingtoday]

Hi,

I am just trying out the Debut software to see if it will do what I need. I have been watching videos and reading tuts but could so with some advice on these three questions:

1.

The 2 audio layers restriction - does this mean that in any scene only two characters can speak? And everything they say has to be in one file? This makes a conversation between two characters hard, and between three impossible. Have I understood this correctly?

2.

The character wizard makes designing a walk easy - but how do you stop a character from walking? I have added keyframes to a movement to stop it, but haven't found a way to just put a character on the stage without having it walk. (except for checking a box in the character wizard - but then there is no walking capability at all when you do want it to start moving)

3.
Changing the angle of the body is super-easy - is there an equivalent for moving the head?

Thanks for the help.

[mattchee]

Not sure about 2 and 3, but I for 1, I think the presumption is that you'd be doing the audio editing in another program, and then bringing your final dialog audio (as one track) into AS. Then you have a second track free if you need to add music or whatever. AS is primarily for animating.

For the audio editing, Audacity is a good free option, available on many platforms, and is widely used. If you have Adobe Creative Cloud (not sure if you do other digital art and may have this), then you have Adobe Audition available to you, and it's pretty dang nice.

[Animatingtoday]

Thanks for the reply.

If you import all the dialogue in one track from a different audio editor, then does that mean that there is a way of allocating a part of each audio layer to different characters within AS?

I don't know if that's clear. I mean, if I have an audio track of Mr X and Mr Y chatting, can each time Mr X speaks be linked to his character and each time Mr Y speaks be linked to his? At the moment I can only see how to link an audio layer to one character.

Thanks for any help.

[mattchee]

Hmm... I don't use the auto-lipsync feature, so I'm not totally sure how that works. I defer to someone who knows more about that than me.

[Pinesal]

As far as stopping the walk animation, you must find the layer where the walk animation exists and put the key frames in there to stop it. That will be the bone layer in which the the body graphics are placed.

Also, if you want more than 2 character to talk, you will have to lip sync manually,