Mailing List AE-List@media-motion.tv ? Message #46442
From: Chris Meyer <chris@crishdesign.com>
Subject: Re: [AE] Good Puppet Tool tutorials
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 08:50:57 -0700
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
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Puppet forms the mesh once; therefore it doesn't deal well with layers that self-animate. But you can animate it's Transform properties in AE, as Transformations are calculated after Effects, and Puppet is an effect. (Unless the layer is continuously rasterized, which rewires the rendering order for transforms to come before effects.)

 - Chris

On Nov 6, 2012, at 4:55 AM, Darren H wrote:

Thank you all for the links and tips! Thanks Chris for the code (and also for your intro to using Audition with AE which I came across. I'll be using Audition from now on I think. Looks like a useful tool).

I'm going to break my model into limbs and use DuIK to create the IK. Have to say Teddy, DuIK looks amazing! 
Currently it looks as though you can only apply Pins to a layer that doesn't move or scale though. Slightly confused by this. Can I pre comp each limb, apply DuIK then apply Pins successfully? 

D.


On 5 November 2012 20:20, Brian Behm <flabbyironman@gmail.com> wrote:



On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Teddy Gage <teddygage@gmail.com> wrote:
   My advice for first time use is to use as few pins as you can get away with to make things easier, and play around with it in a new comp to get a feel. Many people I talk to don't even know about the puppet starch and overlap tools (click-hold on the puppet pin icon to show them) which are crucial to getting a mesh to behave the way you want. I also almost always increase the minimum mesh count for better deformation. 

Also, chop things up if you can. If you're using Inverse Kinematics as well, you may already have done this. But it can be cleaner to animate one piece of your character at a time separated from parts that might not distort properly. On Red Vs. Blue season 10 we had to animate an alien Engineer (a floating turtle/snake like creature in the Halo universe) as a card we could project shadow imagery from in Maya. I built it up using parented objects that had puppeting applied to individual pieces.  It was much easier than trying to starch certain pieces. 

One of other super handy things is recording via the command key. hold command down and click one of your pins and use the mouse to animate it over time. You can build up some pretty complex animations pin by pin (and then obviously tweak the keyframes)

You can see the finished puppeted creature and the way it looked projected here:

Brian Behm
Art Director/VFX Artist
Rooster Teeth Productions
Austin, TX 78749


--
not getting enough of my blather?
check out http://flabbyironman.blogspot.com
or my portfolio at http://behmcreative.com



 
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