Zak and Brandy are two of the many characters we created for the Curriculum Associates iReady Math and Reading digital lessons. We designed and produced forty 35-minute animated lessons using several casts of characters. These are the gesture viewers we used to aid our team through this process.

See Zak’s performance in How Doth the Little Crocodile and Brandy’s performance in The Perplexor.

One of the tools we use in our Character-Animation Strategy is the Gesture Viewer. This is a library of all the animated gestures and capabilities of each character in an animated project.

The Gesture Viewer is used by the animator or developer who is implementing the animation, to preview all the functionally build into an H5Build character.

Here for example are the gestures and capabilities built into Zak and Brandy:

1. Lip-synced Mouths: All our characters have mouth assets that are auto-lip-synced using the amplitude of the attached audio file.
2. Gesture Library: Each character will have their own collection of very short, generic, reusable gestures. Zak and Brandi are primarily on stage talking, presenting, and explaining concepts that are supported with other explanatory graphics and animations.
3. Gesture Controls: Rile’s gestures all start and end with the same default keyframe. The animations are designed to move into a gesture pose, hold that pose for zero or more seconds, and then play the same sequence in reverse to return to the same default keyframe. We can control the forward speed, hold amount and reverse speed.
4. Clusters and sequences of animations can be configured and stored for convenient reuse in the H5Build Library.

For other examples of our Gesture Viewers see the Max and Mia Gesture Viewer and the Riley Gesture Viewer.

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