Probelm with Animation - Eyes

Question

Hi there!I am brand new to animation as well as Character Animator.  I have been tasked with creating animated characters for our HR department.  I created the first one today as a demo and I am having trouble with the right eye.  It is doing odd shape shifting.  I thought I had it set the same as the left but it just won't work correctly.  Any advice?  I have researched the forum and watched numbers of videos on YouTube but haven't been able to fix it. There is one other smaller issue, too, and that is when it is "talking", there are some dead spots where no mouth shows up.  What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance. Any assistance is appreciated. I tried to figure out myself but just keep going around in circles. A screenshot of the eye is attached and a link to the files on Creative Cloud is also provided.  Thanks again!https://adobe.ly/2ESFhqf

alank99101739 · Accepted Answer

Next, don't put a "Left Pupil" group inside a "Left Pupil" group. That creates even more tags to remove. You just want one thing with each tag. So call the nested objects things like "top", "bot" etc so they don't look like the tag names. I would go through all the layers and remove all the extra tags that were added.

BUT! Having done all that, I still had the right eye looking strange! Its exactly what I do, so I don't have a good explanation. What is happening is it is not using the "Right Blink" layer. It is warping the eye to try and do a blink.

Here is a hack that seems to work - click on the puppet to bring up the global puppet properties and look under the "face" behavior. Set the "Eyelid strength" to 1. See if that works. For me, setting it to zero made the eyes stop blinking (don't ask me why!). Then both eyes used the blink layer to blink correctly.

It feels like a bug to me in CH, but I cannot repeat it on my puppet. Mind you, CH has been doing strange things in rigging mode for me since the upgrade, so maybe there are a few bugs lurking there still.

alank99101739 · Answer

Hi. The easiest way for others to have a look is if you use the "Export/Puppet" menu item to create a ".puppet" file. That has all the triggers, behaviors, etc. (not just the artwork).

The most common problems are things like "Independence" not being set up right (the leading "+" sign in the layer name), the layer names not being right (e.g. spelling error) causing the auto-tagging to not work, or the hierarchy not being set up correctly. Sharing the puppet or a screenshot of the puppet hierarchy is the easiest way for people to help.

In this case I imported the PSD file and am guessing you have not made any adjustments to the settings from this. Suggestions:

Rename "Mouth" to "+Mouth" to make it independent. This will stop distorting the head when the mouth moves.

Rename "Left Eye" to "+Left Eye" (and the same for the right eye) for the same reason. And "Left Eyebrow" to "+Left Eyebrow".

Next, if you click on "Left Pupil Range" in the puppet hiearchy, the autotagging is not getting it quite right.

Click on the "A" to get textual names for the tags (easier to refer to here).

See how the "Left Pupil Range" has been tagged with "Left Pupil", "Left Pupil Range" and "Left Pupil Size"? Remove "Left Pupil" and "Left Pupil Size". Then go down to the "Left Eyeball" layer and remove the "Left Pupil Range" tag.

Finally, click on "Right Pupil" and go to the menu and select "Create Clipping Mask". This will clip the pupil by the eyeball.

(I am going to save this to avoid a session timeout - I need to add a bit more.)

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