Puppet Pin, Parenting and 3D

[drmdzh]

Came across what I thought would be a simple problem that has become very obtuse.

I have character in an animation... it needs to be  3D layer in order to sometimes go in front and sometimes behind other objects in the scene. (Unless I'm totally missing something and you can keyframe layer stacking order?)

I would like to use Puppet pins to make the legs of the creature bend, so it can bounce.

I want to have the arms and head be parented to the the body, which is bouncing up and down on the legs.

I've tried using a puppet pin on the body and then parenting the arm's anchor point to that pin. This works great in 2D, but when it's 3D it doesn't work.

I feel like I'm overlooking something really obvious here. Thanks.

[Martin_Ritter]

Hi!

I'm working with Puppet Tool from time to time but always try to avoid it because of problems like this.

Maybe you can drop 3D if you duplicate your creature (put it into a precomp for better handling, if not already) and put it above the layer stack. When you just cut, or switch opacity, when ever you want to be behind or before something.

*Martin

[drmdzh]

Thanks. I thought of that solution for the 3D layer thing, but it's more complex than that - like weaving in and out between other characters.

In some ways I'm happy to see that maybe I'm not just overlooking something obvious!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

There can be no layer movement on a puppet pin layer. No position, scale or rotation keyframes. There is nothing preventing you from making the layer 3D, pre-composing it, and then animating position scale and rotation. If you also make the nested comp 3D you can pre-compose the pre-composed Puppet Pin 3D comp and then animate camera or layer position in 3D space. You just can't do it all on one layer.

Did you follow that?

Make your character move their arms and legs using puppet pin

Pre-compose

Animate the position of the Pre-composed character layer.

[ScooterD76]

If you want to skip the 3D part, just use a duplicate of your character layer as a mask on the objects it is to pass in front of

[craigi35826625]

Rick - just tested and you can most definitely have keyframes for scale, rotation, and position, though depending upon the animation it might screw things up.

If you animate something simple and scale it up/down it works well, the rotation and position not so much.

Though I agree nesting/splitting into multiple comps would make the most sense, if nothing else than proper workflow as I was trained to:

1) build elements/parts

2) assemble scene

3) combine assets

4) color correct

5) animation

6) render

[drmdzh]

Thanks all! Appreciate the responses.