First puppet...pupils are killing me.

[Pete1970]

I am trying something by sketching from a photo in Adobe Draw, then using PS to get it ready for animator. I have been having lots of little victories, but as I was closing in on a good puppet rendition, my pupils began leaving the eyeballs. I am sure that the answer is extremely simple, but I can't seem to figure it out. I tried a clipping mask, but then they just disappear... any ideas?

[alank99101739]

I love Adobe Draw. I personally export in Illustrator format because I think it can resize better (less risk of jaggies when you zoom into pixel artwork from Photoshop). But I assume the following is valid for Photoshop as well.

The thing to watch of is the tagging on all the eye parts. In particular there are two important tags - "Left/Right Pupil Size" and "Left/Right Pupil Range".  You tag your pupil with the "size" tag and then tag something else with the range tag. It will then move your eye pupil to the maximum range possible, without going outside the range.

For example, I personally create a separate oval around the eye that I make transparent. I call this "Left Pupil Range". It means I can control the range more precisely independent to the rest of my artwork.

However I think what is more normal is you have the pupil on a larger eyeball (white background). That is the eyball moves with the pupil. So you tag the eyeball with Range, and the pupil with Size.  I might not have this quite right because I don't do it this way myself.  I got my puppets working to my satisfaction, so I am sticking with what I have.

Sometimes I find that CH adds extra tags when importing the file that I don't want - so you need to go through all the eye groups and subgroups one by one at times to spot unexpected additional tags. E.g. if Pupil Range is attached to the same object as Pupil Size, then the eye won't move.

Oh, and in behaviors you can also adjust the "Strength" settings which affects how close to the range the pupil can move. E.g. you can have your default puppet with a strength of 50%, but for a particular scene override to go to 100% to get a more wacky expression.

[Pete1970]

Thank you, alank99101739! It took me a little while to get it all figured out, but through a combination of your advice, I now have a working puppet! I tried the invisible range, and that fixed one eye but not the other. I checked the tags, and the pupil size and pupil range were indeed separated, but I did not check up the layers quite far enough. My left eye group was also tagged as range. As soon as I took that tag off, it all worked the way that I had planned. Thank you again!