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Clipping mask from illustrator to Ch Animator Situation

Community Beginner ,
Mar 19, 2018 Mar 19, 2018

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So, I have made some clipping masks in illustrator and taken then to Ch without problems(clothing, basically). It gets the clipping group as a single layer, and fine. But I have two arms in wich it is not working. Actually, three, but one got solved just recomposing layers in illustrator. I have tried the same, but it does not work: it gets it as two different layers and therefore the <linked file> in illustrator appears completely, not being the inside of the clipping path. I have tried renaming, reordering...i can´t make it work. Any ideas? Thanks

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LEGEND , Mar 20, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

Oh, just realized my answer might have been not answering your question! I don’t know why the second clipping did not work and the first did.  My understanding is not all Illustrator features are supported by Character Animator - you might have hit one. 

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LEGEND ,
Mar 19, 2018 Mar 19, 2018

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Sorry, I don't understand your description, but I thought that Illustrator clipping masks were not understood by Character Animator. It just understands the transparencies in Illustrator files. There is a clipping mask concept inside Character Animator you can turn on, but I suspect you are not using that from your description. Could you share a screen shot perhaps?

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 20, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

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Thanks! Maybe I am just getting lucky with this clipping masks??? As you can see, clipping mask are interpreted as one layer in my frontal character, while some are interpreted as one layer in the profile and others as two layers(being a problem). I hid the right arm in the profile character so you can see the torso is alright, but the arms are not working.

By the way, do not judge me by my illustrations, please. I am a video editor but someone asked me if I could draw something.

Captura.JPGCaptura3.JPGCaptura2.JPGCaptura4.JPG

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LEGEND ,
Mar 20, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

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Ah, gotcha!  Character Animator tries to auto-detect the outline, but sometimes fails. It is usually because there is some discontinuous object in the layer. There is a property that you can set to “Contour” to force using the outline instead of the default “auto”. You could try just setting that. 

Otherwise (or as well!) try going into AI/PS, go into isolation mode for the suit, then try using the laso tool around the suit to see if you can highlight something that snuck into the wrong layer.

The other thing to try is clicking the little mesh icon at the bottom of the “rig” and “scene” windows. It shows the mesh it allocated to the layer. This is very important to get right otherwise things will distort badly later. Sometimes it highlights the area that is wrong (the mesh looks funny around a point you did not expect).

Regarding artwork quality, looks good to me! I am a programmers with zero formal art training, so I cannot speak either! ;-).  As long as its fun, who cares what it looks like... which I can say since this is a hobby for me, not work.

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LEGEND ,
Mar 20, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

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Oh, just realized my answer might have been not answering your question! I don’t know why the second clipping did not work and the first did.  My understanding is not all Illustrator features are supported by Character Animator - you might have hit one. 

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 20, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

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Thanks! What I did to make it work, suspecting I could have just been lucky, is export to PNG, get rid of the white background in PS and then import that again to the puppet in illustrator. It is not a vector, but playing with the size looks good for Full HD, and the puppet is not vectorizing the movement anyways, so looks good.

Hey, thanks for the support for my artwork : )

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 03, 2019 Oct 03, 2019

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Hey All, 


I've found what I believe to be a better solution for this! 


Basically use the pathfinder tools crop mask instead of a clipping mask. This will then "cut" your shapes to the size of the clipping mask. Meaning it follows through to character animation with no weirdness!

 

Hope this helps someone in the future, was a frustrating problem. 

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New Here ,
Apr 02, 2020 Apr 02, 2020

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I'll have to try this out. Thanks 

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Adobe Employee ,
Apr 02, 2020 Apr 02, 2020

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Looks like you may have figured it out, but here's a small project showing the clipping group in AI *not* being supported in CH and an alternate way of structuring the puppet so that you can get the same results.
https://adobe.ly/39DZFuP

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 30, 2020 Oct 30, 2020

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In my experience this 'CA not liking AI clip groups' behaviour is quite random. Which makes it a real pain.

For example, upon first import from AI to CA, all is fine. Then I need an iteration of the CA project with some small changes to the puppet vector artwork as well. I then create a copy of all of it elsewhere, finetune some AI layers, and then CA suddenly decides clip gruoups are its mortal enemy, even though I might have changed some totally different layers.
I just had a case where I had to 'pathfinder' the hell out of it and injured my wrist converting about 70 clip groups into cropped paths because no layer reordering helped whatsoever.
And then, more randomness ensues, accepting some clip groups that are put in child layers in AI. But which ones? And when? Oh it's a mistery.

Yes, CA has this 'puppet>create clipping mask' command, but I would never consider smashing it 70 times a healthy solution.
Even more so, when CA seems to blubber things up more often when transformations have been made to the artwork elements in CA instead of AI. I mean, I might have moved the characters nose in CA, then I go to AI and work on its neck a bit. Switching back to CA it has made a minced salad of my puppet, shards all over the place. So I'm afraid when I create a clip in CA instead of AI and then update the AI file, all hell might break loose. An it might not. But which then? And how? Or why?
An absolute charlie foxtrot.

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