Triggers allow you to add custom animation events with just a touch of the keyboard. Triggers are super fun, they can be really simple. So if I look at magnus here, he's got two triggers and one of them is very simple. If I just hit S, he gets the hard eyes and they can also be pretty complex. So if I hit a he does this little wave and I've got the motion lines there from the last tutorial. 

So how do we build? Let's start out with a symbol trigger. Okay, so I'm going to go to Project and go to magnus here and edit original. So what I'd like to do is create some emanata that is the sort of little expressive sort of drawings and maybe spirals or squiggles or exclamation points or sweat that comes outside of a cartoon character. So let's do it. 

I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use the Pen tool for this and the Pen tool, if you're not familiar with it, I'd recommend checking out the design jojo and the Pen tool tutorials. But I'm going to just click. I won't even make any curved points. So let's say I just want to make an exclamation point. So I'm just going to click and right now I've got the stroke and fill probably reversed, so I might click the little swap button here and maybe I don't want a stroke at all. So I'll just say none. Okay. And maybe I'll zoom in a little bit for the little dot at the bottom here. And then I'll take both those shapes and I'll group them so I could just drag select for that and hit command G. 

All right? So I've got my little exclamation point that I want to fly out of his head whenever I hit, let's say, the letter D. All right? So maybe I'll just call that wow. Okay, so right now wow is sitting outside of his head and I really want it to be attached to his head. So I'll drag it down here and I'm going to make that independent. So I should have and will add a plus sign in front of it. Okay, so adding the plus and I can even start with these things turned off if we want. 

Okay, so I'll go ahead and say file and save back at the ranch in character animator. Okay. Notice that it actually moved the character down because there's new content that I added and even though it's not visible, it's trying to make room for that, which is actually really helpful. So right now I still have my wave and I've got my hard eyes, but I need to make that exclamation point show up when I hit the letter D, so I can actually do it in the record panel. I could actually add a trigger in here, but let's do it in the rig panel just to make it a little bit easier. 

So all I need to do is hit the plus sign here and say, create a new trigger. Now it's waiting for two things. It's waiting for me to say, well, what is it you want to show up? And then, what's the keyboard key that you want to press to make it show up? 

So I'm going to go to here, and I'm going to drag it on top of that trigger. I want to rename that. So I'm going to hit return, and I'm going to call it wow. And then I'll say that the keyboard key I want to make wow pop up is D. 

Okay, back at record, if I hit the letter D, I now get that trigger. So that's a simple trigger, but we can make some that are far more complex. So in the next video, we'll talk about using the cycle layers behavior to make even more powerful triggers.