Lazy eye

[Adventurebox GmbH]

Hello! I am new at using character animator - really impressed by it so far - I have watched a lot of helpful tutorials and learned a lot. However, I too have stumbled across an eye problem - long story short, only one pupil moves - and it moves out of the eye.. the other doesn't move at all.. it looks like sha has a lazy eye -even though the pupil settings look identical, at least to me. How can I fix this?

[Adventurebox GmbH]

[alank99101739]

Thanks for sharing the link. Good news is its pretty easy to fix.

• The root level is best to make independent, so change “Mimyu” to “+Mimyu” (or click crown next to it in rigging panel)
• Since the “Expressions” are not connected to the head, I would suggest making them independent too. Nothing to do with this problem, but if you look at the mesh its a rectangle. Once you start adding draggers you will need to work out why the yellow mesh outline is not matching the contour of the puppet. Disconnect artwork (like those expressions) is the usual cause, so easy solution is to make them independent if you don't want them warping with the rest of the puppet.

But the real problem you asked about:

• If you look at the Left White and Right White layers, they have the Left/Right Pupil Range tags on them. Remove those two tags. I found them by looking at the “Eye Gaze” behavior, then expanding the “Handles” section. The Pupil Range handles were not binding to your hidden range layers. The “Rigging Issues” panel also lists Left/Right Pupil Range as not being used even though tagged. Another hint of a problem.
• You need to make the pupil range layers a bit bigger. The right eye in particular has the pupil extending beyond the pupil range, so it won’t move. Make sure both pupil ranges are the same size for the eyes to move the same distance.
• I suggest clicking on the Right Pupil layer in rigging mode and selecting “Puppet” / “Create Clipping Mask”. This will cause the pupil to be clipped by the eye whites.

I put the clipping mask here on one eye and not the other - see how one pupil is clipped and the other is not?

Here is how it looks in the rigging panel.

See in the handles section your puppet has Right Pupil Range pointing to Eye White? Removing the tag from the Eye White layer fixed the problem.

[Adventurebox GmbH]

Hey alank - thanks a bunch! Your step-by-step advice really helped a lot - the eyes are fixed now! I can't believe it. This issue really had me stumped. Would have never been able to solve that riddle by myself. At least next time I know where to check. To think that puppets can get even more complex in their behaviour in this tool...

[alank99101739]

First off, I LOVE the artwork! I like the anime style, but I am not an artist, so can only look at nice artwork and be envious! 😉

What i would do next is go through the tags on the layers one by one. The layers look correct, so the tag names is what i think is worth checking next. E.g. if pupil range is wrong. I wrote a blog on how i debug eye problems here https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/ if any use.

[Adventurebox GmbH]

Thank you very much. Glad you like. The tags look right and I suppose you can't manually change the pupil range, right? I managed to make it so the pupil that moved doesn't move at all anymore but... I will have to look into this a bit more and dive deeper to get to the source of the problem, I guess - but your link contains a lot of detailed information, thank you for sharing. There is still a lot for me to learn before becoming good at this ^^. 

[alank99101739]

If you cannot spot it and are willing/able to share, you can upload the exported puppet (see the export puppet command in the menus) and i can have a look and then tell you how to fix it from there. upload to google drive etc and share a link.

Sometimes i wonder about doing a live office hours as a youtube channel, but I don't think enough people would attend to make it worthwhile. So i try to keep replies here in the forums for others to find. I did a few series on starting from scratch, but the view count is not very high. I think most people get over a couple of hurdles then don't need much help after that. Eyes are a problem area (tricky), walk and turning another (but i don't use it often myself), then you get the funky advanced cases that probably no body else cares about! So i think adobe doing videos on special topics like the NDI recent one is probably the right way to go

[Adventurebox GmbH]

ok, I sent it via private message. : )