Eyes not responding

Hi Dan, some extra thoughts on rigging challenges in case useful.

I think one of the challenges with Rigging is the unpredictability of what gets bound to what. Some behaviors pick one set of layers and control that - so if they latch onto the wrong thing, its confusing. This combined with head turner profiles and walk profiles (which share the same profile tags) can mean it becomes quite confusing resulting in needing to add behaviors per profile - even though the settings are the same.

So I would suggest all behaviors control all things that match, never reuse the same tag for two different meanings (like walk and head profiles do today), and get behaviors to play together better (e.g. I think mouth behavior turns off parallax effect on mouth, etc).

The goal should be 99% of puppets should not require manual rigging for ”common” things (head turner, walk behaviors, draggers, etc). I would love to draw an invisible line in the artwork for sticks, a invisible dot for draggers/handles, etc. If you have a multi-profile, multi-head-turn puppet, having to do work per profile each time you need to re-rig it, its very easy to make a mistake ending up with strange results that are hard to diagnose without a copy of the puppet. I would rather have as many behaviors at the root of the puppet as possible, so when significant artwork restructuring occurs (e.g. introduce a new layer over existing layers) I don’t lose all my settings for gravity etc I had on hair dangles.

If you got really funky, let me name a layer “dangle @Physics(gravity=20%)” or something like that so I can encode behaviors directly into layer names.

The Eye Gaze behavior appears to be acting on eyes/brows in a view that was not visible by default. What tipped me off was the Views/Handles sections of the eye gaze behavior's properties panel in Rig mode were referring to the Joshua top level group, but the Joshua Face Right copy was the one that was visible.

I'm going to add a link to this post to an internal board where we keep track of rigging challenges that we'd like to either make easier to avoid or easier to diagnose.

DT

At work still, but I wrote this blog of the most common eye problems I have seen: https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/ - it might have some useful hints to help diagnose the problem.