Head & Torso not moving!!

[pmalabanan333]

Hello everyone,

I've had a pretty annoying problem lately. I've made this character from scratch and got her to limbs to move, but the problem is that her head and torso don't move with them. I made a separate neck layer to connect both the head and torso, but that didn't seem to work. What can I do to fix this?

[alank99101739]

Are you able to export the puppet (In menu) and share on Dropbox or google drive etc with a public link? It’s easier to debug that way.

i notice the body parts are not overlapping. I suspect you may need some rectangles to join arms to body etc. they can be invisible, but with out overlap, things don’t connect.

[pmalabanan333]

Sorry! Here's a link to the puppet file:

base.puppet - Google Drive

[alank99101739]

Thx. I think the problem is you have too many independent layers that are not connecting. If you click on the arms and legs, you see the yellow outline follows the shape correctly? That is good. The legs origin dot overlaps the body too so you get the green circle - good.

But if you click “Body”, see how the outline is a rectangle? That indicates problems to me.

First, I would remove the crown from “Head Shape”. It is part of the head, so should not be independent.

If you click on “Ivy” near the top, I see you put a stick over the feet - but the feet are not in that layer (and if you did fix them walking would not work). I suspect the stick at the feet does nothing.

You have “Ivy base walk” with a nested “Ivy” layer also independent. That feels strange - there is nothing in the root level to attach to. I turned off the crown for “Ivy”.

The eyebrows are strange. If I click on them, the blue box and origin is way off the head. Is there A stray pixel there somewhere? I temporarily dragged them over the body - I will let you look into that one.

Similarly, clicking on “Mouth” shows it off somewhere strange (not over the face).

And “Hair” is another similar layer - origin off somewhere strange.

I think a key problem is the “Neck” layer is independent. As a result, there is nothing joining the Head to the Body. I removed the independence layer and the contour started working. It also keeps the body and head connected.

The origin handles for some of the root levels (Ivy base walk and Ivy) is off the puppet. I put them on the belly button or sometimes feet, but never off the puppet. So I moved them. Various movements are relative to the origin of the puppet, so you want the origin for the puppet near the belly button.

I added a Waist tag to the body layer a bit above the hips. That helped a lot - the hip tags are moved relative to the waist, so no waist results in strange body movements. (You have hip tags on the legs already which is fine.)

I removed two dangles from the tail (or reduce gravity) leaving only a single dangle on the tip of the tail. That stops the tail drooping so badly.

[pmalabanan333]

Thank you so much for your response! I appreciate it. I've fixed most of the problems you outlined in a new puppet. Some of the origins are off because I forgot to create the eyebrows and mouth into this file. I've recently downloaded Character Animator so i'm still learning, but this has been very helpful so far! Thank you so much! I just have one more problem.

I created this new puppet, but it's warping and not moving with the rest of the body. Here's a link to my puppet:

marapuppet (1).puppet - Google Drive

[pmalabanan333]

Sorry, I meant to say that the head is warping and not moving!

[alank99101739]

I must admit this is one I never really worked out myself. I got close, but not quite. I think Photoshop and Illustrator may be a little different here. In particular, with Photoshoop you need to create more groups/layers than Illustrator to keep it happy.

For example, if you make the head independent, then the head will start moving Nicely. Why? I think what is happening is the handles are pinning the head “depencence group” (my name for all the layers that CH glues together because they are not independent) to the background, like fixed pins. That is, the handles are effectively “Fixed” even though they are not tagged as fixed.

Making the “Head” layer independent makes the pins stick the head to the parent dependence group (the body), so the head moves nicely with the body.

To reduce the number of handles, what can you do? Instead of adding handles to a layer in CH, instead create a group around the current layers. This will result in groups with one layer in them, which seems silly but gets around the problem. The groups can be tagged in CH Which means you don’t need the handle.

So for example, you have a “Head” and “Nose” handle. Delete those handles and instead put the tag on the “Head” layer (you don’t need the nose handle for your puppet at all, so just delete it).

Also, for the eyes, there are two approaches:

(1) Remove the Left and Right Pupil handles. To do that, you need to “group” the Left Pupil layer you have so you end up with Left Eye / Left Pupil / Left Pupil. Yes, looks Weird. But the parent Left Pupil layer can now be tagged (the leaf one cannot - CH won’t allow it - no idea why not, but that is how it works). But tagging the group you don’t need the handle any more.

(2) Easier, I would also make your eyes independent. Then the handles can be left there because they effectively stick the eyes to the head (which is fine). So just rename “Left Eye” and “Right Eye” to “+Left Eye” and “+Right Eye”.

Basically consider handles to be pins even if no “Fixed” tag, and things start to make sense. Remove the handles (by introducing groups and tagging the group instead), or make what the handleis on independent so the handle pins it to the parent layer instead of the background.

But I don’t quite understand it - I think the above is how it is behaving, but I don’t understand why.