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JaySprout
JaySprout
Inspiring
October 18, 2019
Question

Butter Face

  • October 18, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 904 views

After I got my first puppet all rigged and awesome so when I tilted my head, the earrings dangled perfectly. Then I customized the mouths and the audio lip-syncing works perfectly ... but now when I tilt my head, it does this ... 

and this ...

It normally, and used to always look like this ... 

What could I have done wrong?

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    3 replies

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    October 18, 2019

    A useful debugging tool is in the scene window (where you are watching the above) is to turn on the "mesh" icon that displays lots of little yellow triangles over the puppet. It should hug the outline of the puppet. When you move the head, you might notice certain points that are not moving, causing the distortion. This can help identify the source of the problem. I often delete bits (then undo) to verify what thing went wrong. It won't necessarily tell you the solution, but it can help be more precise as to what the problem is.

     

    My guess is there is a handle near the mouth causing things to not move. Sometimes if you put the a Mouth tag on an origin for example it plays up as two behaviors try to control the handle but only one wins - so it does not move with the rest of the head any more. But I never quite understood it - I just learnt to try removing some tags, trying independence, fiddle until it works and move on with life!

    mr_zoggy
    mr_zoggy
    Known Participant
    October 19, 2019

    Did you ever get this resolved? I'm seeing a similar issue with my pupils. 

    JaySprout
    JaySproutAuthor
    Inspiring
    October 19, 2019

    Yes, I did. There are two reasons this sort of thing happened (I had two similar issues at different times).

    TL;DR -- either A) you moved items in your AI file so the rigging no longer matches up or B) the layer names no longer match.

    Some background on my process ... I have two files for each character -- "Janet_InProgress.ai" and "Janet.ai". The "inProgress" file has all layers in it including Guides, experiments, templates, etc. and the "Janet" file only has the layers I'll use in Character Animator. When I'm done making changes, I usually would do a save as and delete all the extra layers. This time, however, I changed the size of the artboard in "inProgress" so, when I was done, I copied the relevant layers and pasted them into just "Janet" using the old layers as a guide so I could nudge the new ones into place (See A above ... if the layers move in AI, the rigging no longer matches) then deleted the old ones. However, also while in "inProgress" I'd started to create side views so (See B above) my Layer and Sub-Layer structure didn't match. I used to have "Head" and "Body" as main layers, now I had "Frontal" as a main layer with "Head" and "Body" as sub-layers. The only reason anything showed up at all in those first two screenshots was I didn't delete the old layers, I just toggled their visibility. 

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