Entire head blinks when I blink eyes

[wasy350]

The head blinks along with the eyes - blink is having issue. I've done this many times now and it should be easy at this point. Are my layers in wrong order?

[alank99101739]

I could not see the whole puppet hierarchy, but is there "right eye" under "right eye"? I don't use Photoshop much, but in Illustrator that can result in extra tagging that gets things confused. I would go through the tags on the eyes to make sure they are all okay in Character Animator.

How are you doing blinking? Using autoblink? Are you using a blink layer, keyboard trigger, or the Face behavior etc?

As a reminder, the "tags" in the tag panel are automatically created based on layer names, so multiple layers with the same name can result in additional unwanted tags. I like clicking on the "A" button as I find the text easier to read than the graphical representation. The tags matter, with duplicate tags causing problems.

Oh, and in case useful, this is my blog on debugging eyes: https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/ - I am sure it has lots of things you don't need but sharing in case it has any useful hints. Your eyes are much simpler I am sure, but I could not see how you were trying to do them. A screen shot of the CH hiearchy would be useful.

[ScooterD76 · Accepted solution]

This looks like another case of CH auto tagging the face as a blink.... I would definately look through your tags first, and if its not there, maybe the hiearchy of your layers. I also use Illustrator as apposed to photoshop, so its a little different

[wasy350]

Hi Alan, I'm using auto blink and yes there were two right eye layers - I deleted one. Will get back to you asap and update if any of these changes helped. 

[alank99101739]

As ScooterD76​ said above, the tags matter - but also where they are in the layer tree. My understanding is AutoBlink is designed to work by having a layer tagged as ”Right Eye” with a hidden layer under it called “Right Blink”. The blink works by hiding all the other children of the eye layer and displaying the blink layer instead (like a trigger in a swap set). If you have a different structure I am not sure what would happen. So you may need to create a bit more structure in your Photoshop file to make it structured the way CH expects even though it seems like overkill for your artwork. What could be happening is it is blinking the whole head because it could not work out what to do correctly.

[wasy350]

Yeah Alan the dog is only to move it's head occasionally( I don't need much movement from the dog or any action actually). I was thinking I could get away with a quick rigging of dog but apparently that isn't going to happen. However the dog does need to blink on occasion. I'm working on a different part of story currently, will work back to dog in the next hour or so. Thank you and Scooter for the help. Many Dankes! I will keep you two posted.

FYI the dog lays on the ground and rarely moves, only blinks.