The Concept and Workflow of Hand Design

In this section, you will learn the concept of designing a hand gesture set using Adobe Flash. This involves in sketching of various hand gestures, loading and compacting them as one sprite, and displaying one of them at a certain frame to create hand gesture animations.

The Concept of Hand Design

• It is highly recommended that you produce your hand gestures to mimic the default ones already included in the sprite of the embedded characters in CrazyTalk Animator.
  Download the Mapping List Image.
• You must design hand gestures for left and right hands separately.
• In CrazyTalk Animator, the elements of the hand sprite are automatically retrieved and displayed according to the motion you apply.
  Please note that the motion may come from the templates in the Motion and Perform library, or by using the Puppeteering Panel to create a motion. Some of these motions may be designed to switch hand gestures at different times.

  Motion 1 applied (Hand gesture auto-switches)	Motion 2 applied (Hand gesture auto-switches)

• You can also manually switch to any other hand gesture at a different frame via Sprite Editor.

The Workflow

In this example, the left hand elements set is taken for describing the workflow. You may apply the same steps to create the right hand.

1. Design at least 33 hand gestures in Flash Adobe. The 33 gestures must be produced according to the list shown in the Mapping List.
   
2. Convert each hand gesture to a Movie Clip symbol.
3. Export all the symbols by right click on them and select Export as Movie. The method is the same as described in the Exporting Body Parts from Flash section.
   
4. In CrazyTalk Animator, apply a character. Switch to the Character Composer mode.
5. Click the Sprite Editor and use the Replace button to load all the gesture SWF data. The method is the same as described in the Importing Body Elements section.
   
   • If you load SWF data into a wrong item in the list, use the Page Up and Page Down keys to shift the data to another item.
   • These two buttons only move the data without affecting the original order of the list.

     SWF data applied to an inappropriate icon.	Page Up key moves the SWF data forward.

   • If you have produced more than 33 hand gestures in Adobe Flash, which are not in the mapping list, then you can load them into the Custom mapping category.
     
6. Transform the hand gesture in the Element-level one by one. Please refer to the Aligning the Hand Elements - Element-level or Sprite-level section for more information.