Can't get my puppet's head to tilt

[hjklfdsa]

Hi all,
I've been at this all day and I'm at my wits' end. It has been some months since I have used Character Animator and my old puppet, so I decided to start from scratch. I wanted to update some details in the Illustrator file (hands, eyebrows, cosmetic changes.) I've re-rigged the puppet and finally got everything working. Except, I cannot get the head to tilt. I've downloaded Chloe and Seth to examine how they are rigged. I'm stumped

Also, (not sure if it is related) the mesh and mesh outline do not outline the head or body. Instead they extend all the way out to the bounding box. I could really use some help solving this mystery. Thank you!

Dropbox - MOE_the_Knowbot_2018.puppet

[alank99101739]

Nice artwork!

I think the problem is you have the "head" layer as NOT an independent group, and the children "frontal", "left profile" etc as independent groups. The "head" tag (used by the face tracking" is therefore associated with the main body, not the different profiles. The main body then moves with the head, but the actual head profiles are independent, so are not affected. I removed the "head" tag manually from the "head" layer, then added the "head" tag to each of "frontal", "left profile", "left quartile" etc and it started working.

Not sure if this is the correct approach - I have not used head turners yet - but it seemed to work. (I don't know if a better solution is to make the "head" layer independent instead for example).

You may also want to reduce the "head position strength" to keep the head closer to the rest of the body (it floats away a bit when I was playing with it).

[alank99101739]

Oh, and regarding the mesh, there is a property "Mesh Shape" which you can change from "Auto" to "Contour" to get it shaped correctly. Auto struggles when there are multiple unconnected parts in a layer. I don't know the exact rules. But try changing the property to "Contour" and see if that fixes the problem for you. I suspect less of a problem with your puppet since the head is pretty rectangular and things like eye movements and eyebrows etc don't warp the head.

[hjklfdsa]

This fixed the Mesh Shape problem. Thank you.

[hjklfdsa]

Ok. I tried this and didn't get the exact results I was looking for. It was better. And most importantly you made me want to continue to figure out what was going on. I ended up reverting back to many of my original settings. Head is tagged "head" and not independent. The head turns (frontal, left profile, etc.) are independent and *not* tagged "head". Then I made sure the head and body were "attached to" "MOE" (the top level puppet layer) and that the head turns were "attached to" "head". Before these were all set to "auto" Also, I changed the "attach style" of the head turns from "weld" to "free". Now I'm getting the results I wanted. Not sure if what I changed fixed it or if it was just restarting the program. Regardless, Thank you so much for taking a look at this and helping me to fix the problem.

And thank you for the compliment on the artwork!

[SharonfromMD]

I'm not an expert but a beginner. So here's a suggestion in that category. Make sure you don't have little tiny parts left around the character. It will throw everything off. I always do a sweep around the "blank" spaces in Illustrator when I'm importing assets to CA.

[Jeff Almasol]

In the "body" group you have a hidden "Lines" layer that's doesn't overlap anything else, so the default Mesh Shape of Auto will switch to a rectangular mesh to encompass all of the pieces. (It looks at the hidden layer and tries to include it in the mesh in case you might trigger it on.)

As for the head tilt, after removing the Lines layer, try increasing Head Tilt Strength.

[hjklfdsa]

Thank you! I missed the extraneous layer. I've deleted it