How to use shadows on draggable parts? Or: How to link/attach certain sub-puppets to other sub-puppets?

Report · Jun 28, 2019

Hello!

I replicated the shadows as explained nicely in one of the fantastic tutorials from Dave Werner on YouTube.

It all works well. The thing is: My character has arms with draggable handles.

--> How do I make the shadow arms move around simultaneously as a shadow normally would? (Except when the cowboy is faster!)

The problems seems to be:

Ch always uses the "draggable" handle closest to where my mouse points, but never two handles at the same time. So the result is: Either my arm is moving without the shadow caring about it at all, useful for Lucky Luke animations only, or, you guessed it, the other way round: The shadow moves with no original arm bending to explain that movement.

Any ideas?

A possible workaround would be using magnetism, I guess, but this is not a long-term solution since it would lessen the puppet's or scene's ability to use magnets for the originally intended purposes, i.e. grabbing a fish, etc., plus the behaviour is designed for particles right now, so I'm not sure that would work, haven't yet tried it in practice…

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(Possible) FEATURE REQUEST (will post it accordingly if there isn't a feature helping out yet):

(Ideally) Give the shadow puppet a behaviour "mimic everything that this or that element does" - This would neatly allow me to use just one flat shadow layer without needing to rig anything on that puppet. Well this obviously leads to a "shadow behaviour" which is probably on the team's list already…
(A workaround in this case, see 1.), but potentially useful for a couple of other needs)

a) Being able to "bundle" certain dragging points (as you could /can do with the puppet tool in AE)

b) Being able to connect certain independent parts to certain handles, like, in this case, a shadow arm that gets tagged in a way so that it also reacts to the draggable handle of the top level arm. I can imagine an octopus' many arms to be better controllable with s.th. like this, too.

Thank you…

Report · Jun 29, 2019

If you go to the home of the forums area there is a link to a separate area for feature requests where others can then vote for them as well.

No advice on shadows sorry. Was there a specific effect you were after? It may be different types of shadows need different types of controls.

There was a recent post on a shadow for a balloon with some discussion, but that was a much simpler use case. E.g. use a MIDI slider bound to two puppets - the balloon where a slider moved it up/down, and a shadow where the same slider was bound to the scale (size) of the shadow. Then a second slider for the X value which moved both the same way.