When using the Puppet Warp tool, can you keyframe the mesh expansion value?

Question

Hi there! How's everyone? I have an illustrated character whose beard is animated with the Puppet Warp tool. The transition to the next scene is a big zoom in, and there's a problem: the 'expansion' value I had set for the mesh disortion doesn't scale along with the character. I see this artifact that breaks the image, which happens when the mesh is too small for the object, but I can't add keyframes to expand this 'expansion' value of the mesh. I thought I could parent this value to an adjustment layer with a slider control and expand it from there, but it doesn't let me either. All I could do was fade out the opacity of the effect before the illustration zooms in, but that's just a workaround, not a proper solution.I hope I'm making myself clear. Thanks in advance to anyone who knows how to solve this!Cheers,Luigi

Warren Heaton · Answer

You're on the right track - increasing the Expansion value will prevent artwork from tearing. However, you're also - as you've noticed - hitting a dead end.

You'll want to create, or recreate, the Puppet Tool animation at its largest size such that the zoom results by the scale change ending at 100%. Let's say your current animation goes from 100% scale to 400% scale, then you want to recreate it such that it goes from 25% to 100% instead. While this should work fine with a corresponding layers parented to a Null Layer for the scale change, it's probably better to do it via a nested Composition and make sure the Collapse Transforamtions remains off in the containing Comp.

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