Adobe Character Animator 2026

About this release

Character Animator turns a layered artwork file into a puppet that performs live. A camera watches the operator's face and drives the head, eyes, eyebrows and expressions of the character. A microphone drives the mouth, with speech analysed into visemes and matched to the mouth shapes in the artwork. Keyboard triggers swap poses, props and gestures on cue. What comes out is a recorded performance rather than a hand animated sequence.

The workflow is unusual and that is the point. Instead of keyframing a walk cycle you record a take, and if it is wrong you record another one. Layers of performance stack, so the head can be recorded first, the arms in a second pass and the props in a third, and each layer is trimmed and blended on a normal timeline afterwards. Broadcast and streaming teams use this to put an animated character on air in real time.

Rigging is done once and reused forever. Artwork prepared in the layered image or vector applications is tagged with a naming structure the application recognises, and it builds the rig from that: head, eyes, mouth set, limbs and dangling elements are found and connected automatically. From there physics behaviours add believable secondary motion to hair, clothing and anything else that should trail behind the main movement.

Output goes wherever the project needs it. Record straight to a video file, send the scene to the editing or compositing applications with dynamic link, or take the live camera output into streaming software so the character appears on a broadcast as it is performed. The bundled starter puppets are usable as they are and serve as working examples of how a rig should be structured.

What it does

Camera driven performance

Head position, eye movement, eyebrows and expression follow the operator's face in real time.

Speech to mouth shapes

Audio is analysed into visemes and matched to the mouth artwork automatically as the take records.

Trigger driven poses

Keyboard triggers swap poses, props, gestures and backgrounds on cue during a recording.

Automatic rigging

A correctly named layered artwork file becomes a working puppet without manual joint setup.

Physics behaviours

Hair, clothing and dangling elements get secondary motion without being animated by hand.

Live output

Send the performance straight to streaming software or record it as layered takes on a timeline.

Changed in this version

• Face tracking is more stable in uneven lighting.
• Mouth shape matching improved on fast speech.
• Physics behaviours calculate faster in scenes with many puppets.
• New starter puppets added to the bundled set.
• Live output latency reduced for broadcast use.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive and run the installer.
2. Connect the camera and microphone before first launch so they are detected.
3. Open a bundled puppet first to confirm tracking works before rigging your own artwork.
4. Set the recording folder to a drive with plenty of space.

Worth knowing before you start

File details