head distortion

[cherryr57725896]

I'm getting head distortion too https://www.dropbox.com/s/ipcd5j66e4ua237/Robin3SmallFront.ai?dl=0

Any help would be greatly appreciated

And here is the Character Animator file

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oq495m8ss4rexxt/Character%20Animator%20Robin.zip?dl=0

[oksamurai]

The distortion was happening because there were no blink layers and eyelid strength was still 100%.

Try this: Adobe Creative Cloud

[cherryr57725896]

Thanks so much for helping, the head isn't distorting now but I can't see any blink layers in the puppet and I would really like to know how to fix or avoid this problem in the future

[El Wombat]

What you really need is this:

The same for "Right", of course…

+Left Eyebrow

Left Eye (Group)

     Left Blink

      +Left Pupil

     Left Eyeball

Eyelids you don't really need, but you would put them INTO the respective eye group. Check how the puppet "Wilk" is done, he has different sets of lids that you can trigger with keys. I believe he is included here: http://adobe.ly/1K89iBD (Okay Samurai Free Examples…

Keep in mind that you don't necessarily see everything in the actual scene (within ChAn) that you do in the artwork and the other way round. For example, you can toggle on/off visibility of the "blink" layers and they will still behave like "blink" layers all the same whether you are seeing them in the PSD-file or not… Also keytriggers have effect on visibility…

At the beginning it can all be overwhelming but you'll be just fine when you stick to the tutorial videos Dave made, starting with this one maybe: Making Your First Character (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial) - YouTube

Have fun!

[El Wombat]

P.S.: It's fun to fool around with having no "blink" layers, though. Depending on the artwork in can look quite interesting. Without a blink layer (named or tagged as such or, ideally, both…) the eyes will scale when you blink, sometimes dragging other parts of the face with them.

Normally you really don't want this but it's still fun to experiment with the "mistakes"… 

[cherryr57725896]

Thanks for getting back to me, I did the tutorials but then wanted to create a character of my own, I'm new to the Adobe suite and find illustrator much more intuitive than photoshop as you can easily move stuff around.

It's not obvious that the blink is so important, I thought I could just add that on afterwards and if you don't have it you set the eyelid strength to 0 as the algorithm relies on these properties.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Basically, if you don't have Right Blink or Left Blink layers, go to Face > Eyelid Strength and change that to 0% - that will stop your character from blinking completely.