Eyes Are out of nowhere being wonky and crazy

[maryp99409174]

I've watched and read the debugging blog and video and its not stray pixels as my pupils and eyeballs are vectors. It was working fine this week and now out of nowhere the eyes are acting crazy.

[alank99101739]

https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/ ... oh darn, did you say you read that already!

The main culprits are:

• The tagging hierarchy in Character Animator. If a stray tag snuck in somewhere, it can mess things up.
• The "+" of independence was missed on a pupil it can cause the problem as well.
• Stray pixels or "pupil range"s that are smaller than the pupil

Can you provide a screenshot of the layer hierarchy inside character animator?

If you share a puppet I don't mind having a quick look. (Use the File menu export puppet and upload to Google Drive or similar.)

Hmm, I notice the nose disappeared as well? And the mouth is different. Probably unrelated, but curious nonetheless.

[maryp99409174]

Mary's Puppet.puppet - Google Drive

[maryp99409174]

I sent the puppet to you let me know if you can dl it!

[alank99101739]

Hi Mary - I did download it, but it is a bit funky in ways I did not understand from a quick glance. I had some problems loading the file - talking about missing "smart vector" content.  I think you may be using some features Character Animator does not support (I am guessing) - it appears to be getting confused about what barriers are where. E.g. the blush bounding box goes beyond the face:

I don't think CH is doing a good job of coping with these parts. E.g. in CH I select the "sweatdrop" on the forehead (see the blue outline) and it shows the yellow contour around the body!

I think there is something hidden in the layers getting CH confused causing some of these problems. I am having a look, but not immediately obvious.

[alank99101739]

Here is a bit more strangeness. The "Left Eye" is also marked with Left AND RIght Pupil range - that definitely needs fixing, but is not the whole story.

Also the "Right Pupil" (and Left Pupil) layers have a child layer with the same name - I think is this just how PhotoShop works, but it looked strange having the parent and child layers both with Left Pupil and Left Pupil Size on... but it might be okay.

After fiddling I got it so the Left eye works fine, but the Right eye works fine up/down but is crazy (wrong direction) for left/right. Weird...

However, PhotoShop is saying it cannot find all the files, so not sure if the above is enough to fix it for you know - maybe I am hitting something weird about the PSD file not having all the externally referenced files correctly.

[alank99101739]

So to summarize, the Eye tags need checking carefully - there are some extra tags on layers that should not be there - e.g. Pupil Size on the parent Eye layer They are definitely causing problems.

[DanTull]

Hi again --

I just wanted to make sure you got back to good.

Looking at the puppet a little while back, I think Alan's point about the extra Pupil Range tags on the Left Eye group was the most critical to getting the eyes to behave again.

Anyway, just wanted to check in.

Thanks -- DT

[andrews20644770]

I'm having similar issues.

I have "eye gaze" added to many face layers, which are set up to operate as mouths. In every instance, the pupils (keyboard input) work correctly. However, in one group of faces, the pupils do the opposite (up instead of down, left instead of right)

I've quadruple checked layer names, layer tags, hierarchy, behavior settings. I've restarted Ch. and Ai. I can't find out what I'm doing wrong, or what would cause the pupils to behave inversely.

I will send my puppet:

• Once open, hit 'L' to swap over to the character's Sad Face.
• There's a Head Group called "Head_Sad," within which you'll see a group of 3 mouths/faces with the lip sync behavior. Below That you'll see the same group of mouths with a cycle layers behavior ('W'), so I can hold his mouth open.
• Together, both groups total 6 Eye Gaze behaviors, along with 6 Face behaviors (all of which blink correctly).
• While I prefer keyboard input, the pupils move inversely regardless of the input used.
• You'll notice, if you hit 'K' to swap over to the character's Mad Face, it's setup the same way, but the pupils move correctly.

Again I've gone over every possible thing I can think of. Why does this only happen on the sad face? ... I'm sure it's something so small and unnoticeable.

Also, this is very valuable IP, and would greatly appreciate this being reviewed internally only. Will message Google Drive link privately.
Thank you

~Andrew

[alank99101739]

If the eyes go in the opposite direction than expected, the normal thing is the Pupil Size layer is greater than the Pupil Range layer. This could be stray artwork in the pupil layer, or mistagging of the pupil range (e.g. multiple tags). I would check the blue and yellow outlines for the pupil size and pupil range layers (whatever has been tagged with those tags) to see if the bounding boxes is larger/smaller than you expected.

[j_n_m]

I found that starting a completely new project, and using the exact same PSD seemed to fix the issues I was having with this (eyes going the wrong way/crazy eyes).  Also seemed to fix it so the performance is better overall.  I guess something in the original project was wonky and had to use the IT Crowd workaround.