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tshill
Known Participant
March 16, 2025
Question

Make one character follow another exactly?

  • March 16, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 281 views

I'm working with a vector (.ai) character. But I have two conflicting things:

1. The character has a gradient "glow"layer behind it
2. I want to run the Wiggler behavior on a separate layer of the character ... which requires me to Render as Vector ... which makes the gradient not work.

If I were to make the gradient glow a separate character (not Rendered as Vector), is there an automated way to have that Glow character exactly track the positioning/scale/etc. of the main character? So that, essentially, I could stack the one on top of the other and they would basically behave as a single character?

 

    1 reply

    TheOriginalGC
    Community Expert
    TheOriginalGCCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 16, 2025

    The problem (as I see it) is that you can only have one puppet selected at a time when triggering motions and activity. So you can't do it in real time, but you could possibly copy and paste the timeline of one puppet to another.  after recording for one of the puppets. Depending on what you need the puppet to do, you could also have a replay though I am not sure how to copy one replay to another puppet.

    T
    tshillAuthor
    Known Participant
    March 16, 2025
    Hmm… but you *can* arm 2 characters for face tracking at the same time. So
    if I need to move the character(s) across the screen, I might have to
    manually type in those start and stop coordinates/times, but presumably the
    face tracking for both characters would record as normal. I’ll have to
    experiment.
    T
    tshillAuthor
    Known Participant
    March 18, 2025

    OK! So I mostly have this sorted out.

     

    I was able to get the face tracking/head bounce movement to track both characters. But I had to be careful about what I stripped out of the glow-only character. When I deleted all the .ai layers except for the glow, the two puppets would not track in sync—the glow had a much wider range of movement when tracking my face. I finally learned, by process of elimination, that the glow-only puppet needed to at least have the Left Eye > Left Pupil / Right Eye > Right Pupil layers to track the same. So right now it's stripped down to just:


    With the Left Eye and Right Eye layers turned off.

     

    For big moves (having the puppet move onscreen, bounce around, etc.) I do still need to first move the full puppet and then copy and paste the Transform timeline onto the glow-only puppet. And there can be some abruptness in the switch from the pasted movement to the face-tracking movement ... so I'll have to see as I make actual stories how well this works in practice.

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