Participant

Question

Pupils don't scale while head is scaling

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
April 9, 2019
7 replies
1002 views

Hey there,

I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong. The problem is the following:

I used the Chloe Illustrator example file and built my character on it (deleted the Chloe parts). Everything works fine except the eye behavoir.

I wanted the head to be scaling a lot, so I set the "Head Scale Strength" to 100 which looks pretty good, but the pupils are not scaling with the head. The eyeballs are scaling though, but the pupils look really big when the head is scaled down and they look very tiny when the head is scaled up.

I put a plus sign before each pupil in the AI file, so I can record eye movement in Character Animator. If I delete the plus sign, the pupils are scaling correctly, but in this case they're fixed and the eye movement doesn't work. So I basically need a solution to achieve both: moving eyes that are still scaling when the head does.

The weird thing about this is that I achieved this with another puppet which I set up in the exact same way. I took the AI file from that character and replaced the elements with those from the other character (all based on the Chloe file). Still, the pupil scaling does not work here.

I'm gonna add 2 screenshots of my setup. You can see the tiny pupils in the 2nd picture with the big head. I want them to have a normal size here...

I'd be happy about any comments on this Thanks!

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alank99101739

Legend

Interesting! I normally say “only ever use Auto, never attach To another layer” as I had not come up with a reason for doing it before. But if it works, go for it!

V

vewedesignAuthor

Participant

Hm, that's true, the rest is set to "Auto". But for the other puppet where it scaled the right way from the beginning, the pupils were attached to their eyes without me doing anything... It's all a bit weird. But I'm happy it works now and that I now know how to fix this issue or similar ones Thanks!

alank99101739

Legend

Hmmm. Did you tag the pupils with “Head”? The Face behavior needs to know where the head is. If you remove the behavior later, make sure you remove the tag as well! You can check view View/Handles area of the property to see if it has bound to anything.

Are there any other behaviors on the pupils? If some other behavior is controlling them, the Face scale might not work. Basically one thing normally controls a layer - Ch does not merge the control signals from multiple behaviors.

If you like experimenting, I was wondering if you can put a child under the pupil layer, make it also independent, put the Face behavior on that and tag it Head. The idea is the position of the nested pupil will be controlled by the parent, but the transform will be controlled by the nested Face behavior. This can be useful is some other behavior has taken control of the parent pupil layer. But this is just experimentation. I am not sure how it is supposed to work.

DanTull, do pupils scale with the rest of the face normally?

DanTull

Adobe Employee

This does seem wrong to me and there is a bug open about this behavior (I added this forum link to the internal bug report for reference).

DT

V

vewedesignAuthor

Participant

Hey hey, thanks for your replies! I found a solution!

Thank you for the hint with the tags, alank99101739. That helped a lot and led me to the solution.

So basically what I did was click on the layer "Left Pupil", then go its properties (window on the right) and set the property "Attach to" to "Left Eye". For some reason this was set to "Auto" here, I don't know when that happened. I did this for the left and right pupil and now they both behave like they should! Wonderful!

This does also explain that it worked with my other puppet where the pupils were attached to their eyes in the right way. I don't know though at which point they were set to "Auto" in this puppet. I did not do this myself because I didn't even know about this window until now... so it must somehow have happened automatically. No big deal if you know that and just set it back but if you don't... it's confusing

Here's a screenshot of the "Attach to" property you have to change. Maybe this helps other people too.

Thanks everybody!

alank99101739

Legend

Because the pupils are independent, maybe they don’t scale with the face behavior. What you can try is to add the Face behavior to the pupils as well. You can even set the face scale strength to a different value which could be fun (zoom them way bigger when you lean forwards).

But I have no idea why it worked on one puppet and not another. I would have expected the pupils to scale. The above is just a suggestion if you want to experiement.

To add a behavior to a nested layer, in the rig hierarchy next to the layer name you want, under the lego brick icon at the top of the column, when you hover a “+” should become visible. Click and select the Face behavior to add that behavior to that layer (controls that layer and children).

V

vewedesignAuthor

Participant

Hi, thanks a lot for the reply. That sounds like a pretty good idea, but it doesn't work.

I added the face behavior to the pupils and changed the face scale strength as you suggested, but it didn't have any effect at all.

But I agree that it would make sense if it worked like that... wouldn't it? Does it work for anybody else here or is this a bug?

And still: it works with my other puppet (with the exact same setup, done on another computer (Mac) though. Atm I'm working on a Windows machine but I don't think this can be relevant?).

Thank you!

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