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PintoSixty
PintoSixty
Known Participant
February 20, 2017
Question

Eyebrows and pupils won't respond

  • February 20, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1804 views

Using a "Making Your First Character" tutorial (by Okay Samurai) as a guide, I rigorously followed the instructions for rigging the eyebrows and pupils for a simple test character, then tested the character several times.  The eyebrows and pupils won't respond, even with the parts labelled and assigned correctly (I think) in the puppet panel;  and even with facial recognition having no problem in the camera window.  Can someone please tell me why these parts don't respond?  I am attaching a screenshot of the setup in the puppet panel.  Yes, this is how I dress at 11:44 am when I'm working on Adobe projects.  And, yes, I will still have my robe on until 3 p.m.

Also, as a test, I opened the Wilk character provided as a download in the tutorial, and the eyebrows and pupils worked fine in that setup.

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    2 replies

    El Wombat
    El Wombat
    Inspiring
    February 21, 2017

    Hello harborphil,

    nice robe!

    Regarding the other issue:

    Hard to tell why "your" pupils don't react, because the general setup seems ok:

    Within a +Puppet lies a "Head-Group" in which the eyes are nested. That should do, normally, if you have everything tagged correctly, as you wrote, but it's not visible in the screenshot.

    Some things I saw and or would recommend:

    - Get rid of the "+" for your mouth, if you just want it to speak normally.

    - Name your layers (generally stuff) to match the "tags" closely. That way, instead of tagging everything layer by layer in ChAn, they will already be tagged right.

    Example: "Left Pupil" will automatically tag the left pupil as such.

    - IMPORTANT: Whichever naming structure for your artwork and layers you will use: Avoid "L" and "R" at all times for ChAn will think these are meant to represent mouth shapes, called "visemes". There are 11 consonant "visemes", two of them are "L" and "R". (Another potential cause of your eye-issues.)

    - Especially at the beginning I would recommend you use template puppets instead of "rigorously" following the video. If you loaded that template puppet into PS or AI you would be able to simply replace (or adapt or even keep parts of) the artwork with your own.

    Then you should encounter no such eyes that do not react.

    A final possible reason for this, is, of course: Are the eyes "armed"? In the scene panel, on the right, you would open "Eye Gaze" if you wanted to check on that. Is there a rot dot visible where it says: "Camera input"? It should…

    Happy puppeting!

    W.

    El Wombat
    El Wombat
    Inspiring
    February 21, 2017

    P.S.: Forgot to mention the "Blink" layer. You definitely want a blink layer, for the eyes warp around sheepishly if you don't. But they do react, even without that blink layer, so that's not the reason for your problem.

    oksamurai
    oksamurai
    Legend
    February 21, 2017

    I noticed the names on the left are not the canonical names - like I see R eye instead of "Right Eye", or "Brow" instead of "Right Eyebrow", and so on (although it looks like you've correctly tagged one of the eyebrows at least). My guess is there's something off with the naming/tagging - if you named them exactly like Wilk I think it should work. You might want to rename everything in AI or the PSD and then reimport.

    What are the eyeballs for the pupils? I see there are eyeball layers (not named correctly) but it's not easy to tell what shape they are. If you just have the black dots without an eyeball shape then they won't move because they don't have any range.

    PintoSixty
    PintoSixtyAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 21, 2017

    The eyeballs are transparent, as created in AI.  I assumed that the pupils would need to be housed in eyeballs, but I only wanted the pupils to be visible (and moving).  I guess that the eyeballs need some transparency?  And, if so, how about 1%?.  (I'm in the process of renaming to canonical standards. Will let you know if this works.)

    How can I delete a handle?  During the course of tweaking things, a handle has mysteriously appeared in the "right eye" layer.  Can't seem to find out what it's for.

    El Wombat
    El Wombat
    Inspiring
    February 21, 2017

    I don't think you need that 1% opacity, but you can have whatever visibility you like.

    I don't think you absolutely need the eyeball layer but it does help to tell the pupil where to go (or not to).

    _________

    Delete a handle:

    Doubleclick on the puppet to open it in the puppetpanel, find the layer where you have that handle that you don't want, select it, delete it by pressing that key.

    Note that you can never delete an "origin points". Those points can be used as specific handles, but they don't have to be.

    While they will not be deleted, you can move them and you can also change the type of handle or you can un-tag that handle-behaviour by selecting the handle and pressing on the tag in the properties panel.

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