Edits to Shareable from Photoshop Not Reflected in Character Animator

[RaizelDesign]

Hi all,

I have a bunch of super-complicated puppets that were created months ago - and used a lot in the interim. In efforts to keep the file size down, I took @oksamurai 's advice (original post from last August if anyone's interested) and made the different heads shareable, but I think I messed up by making a totally separate file for the heads and leaving the bodies with flat replaceable layers for placement purposes. I just noticed an unmoving eyebrow in the profile views of my heads, which I had thought that I'd fixed in a previous project but whatever, so I opened all the head files in my media folders and, cut the eyebrow out of the face background layer, put it on a new layer, labeled correctly, and adjusted the face layer accordingly.

In my Ch puppet, the face layer now shows no eyebrow which is great, but the separate eyebrow layer isn't importing. If this was a regular puppet, I'd refresh the link, but I can't find the link here.

I know this whole thread might be a bit confusing, but I'd love to get some help from someone at Adobe who is involved with the shareable puppets. Anyone know who I can ask? @DanTull maybe?

Thanks!

[oksamurai]

I haven't used shareable puppets a lot so I'm not sure what the best method may be...

If I take a sample puppet like Chad and make his eyeball shared, then open the eyeball in Rig mode, I do see the option to "Reset layer" if I right click on anything. Are you able to do this?

I wonder if you take wherever the eyebrow should be in there or the corresponding group in the puppet and reset to see it? I would first save a File > Export > Puppet backup because resetting will remove rigging.

Let us know if none of this works and we can try to take a closer look.

[RaizelDesign]

The layer isn't showing up at all - I created a new layer that wasn't there before and since it was the whole head that was shared, I don't have a group to reset. Resetting the face background layer did nothing. I'm saving the exported heads and the corresponding Photoshope files here.

I have two almost identical characters and made the change in just one - they had the same issue - so if you look at the Bina heads you can see that the eyebrow is in the PSD, but not the puppet and if you look at the Rina ones, you can see how they were originally set up.

I have another version of the Rina one that I had had to make a different head set for and made much later, so I had shared the heads from within the single psd file (meaning, the puppet is linked to a single file and I just used certain groups multiple times as opposed to here where I have one puppet linked to two separate files) and there, the changes I made in the PSD were reflected in the Ch file, so that seems to be something contributing to the issue.

[oksamurai]

Ah I see what you mean now. Let me ask the team if they have any additional insight.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks so much! If all else fails, I'll rerig it. But even so, I feel like it's a bug that could/should be worked out.

[RaizelDesign]

Or at the very least, now we can all know the disadvantages to linking to a separate file for shareables even though it might slim down the puppet.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Here's what I was able to find out:

"If the shared puppet belonged to one that's still in the project updating that original link might work? We intentionally hide the link on a shared bit because the semantics around reconciling shared puppets are very complicated without the context of its original puppet and its document coordinate system. If the project no longer contains the original puppet (based on project view maybe?) it was shared from, then I think maybe it won't work anymore unfortunately."

So if updating the original puppet link doesn't seem to do anything, then yes, I would probably say unfortunately re-rigging is probably your best bet.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks for looking into it! I guess I'll get started on re-rigging then.

[RaizelDesign]

Just an update here, as I'm rerigging the puppets to not contain shareables, the puppet files are actually slimming down to less than half of what they were with shareables - and I had only set them up that way in an effort to keep the file sizes down in the first place! Weird, but I'm not upset that at least that's happening.