Building a more complex puppet

It's a good idea to think about your puppets structure before you start building it. If you want a thing to be affected by gravity, you'll likely want that on a separate layer in Photoshop, same goes for things you want to go in front or behind things(e.g., arms).

Conversely, there's no benefit to having certain things as separate layers unless you're going to be doing something with them, so if your character's shirt consists of 150 layers in a group, rasterizing that into one layer would make sense. In general though, keeping things as separate layers gives you more flexibility later on during the rigging and performing stages.

We have customers using puppets with thousands of layers, so CH can handle a pretty complex puppet.

Puppets with multi-view heads and bodies can cause some performance issues. Lets assume you have 5 head and body positions, that's 25 puppets running all at once, even if you're only looking at one head and body at the same time. There are ways to work around these performance issues though.

Dan R.

CH QA

Pretty complex. I've seen a PSD with 1000+ layers work. The biggest limiting factor will be your computer's performance. This is why it makes sense to continually check the puppet live in CH while you build to keep stress testing and seeing if it will work. You can also download similar complex puppets form our examples and see how well they run as a benchmark.