Problems with Head Movement

[DeWittP]

Good afternoon,

I'm brand new to Character animator and still very much learning, what I'm trying to achieve has probably been discussed a thousand times, but I cannot seem to articulate my search query correctly. So I apologize in advance if this is a repeat question.

I'm trying to get my head to track movement and not warp and still have the body follow the movement. It seems I can either have the head move with the body (in which case the sides of the face warp, or the head move independently and body stays still.

in the screen shot below you can see the body is twisting which is correct, but the head is warping on the characters left.

and below if I make the head independent it moves how I'd like it too, but the body no longer moves at all.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[alank99101739]

You are understanding correctly. If a child layer is independent, it will not affect movement of parent. If not independent, you get warp effects.

Tricks:

• Tag the chest as a head as well. CH does not care if it really is a head or not! So the web cam will then move the real head and the chest at the same time. You might need to put a second behavior on the puppet so the real head moves more than the chest (E.g. have different Strength settings for the two behaviors)
• Try sticks across the shoulders to minimize the effect of warping. Works better if there is a tall neck. I am not sure this will work for your artwork as the head overlaps the body too much.
• Try changing the puppet structure. This one is tricky to make work well, but you can make the chest section independent then attach it to a “spine” that connects the waste up to the head and neck. The chest section being independent will no longer warp - attach it to the spine and hopefully it will stay in reasonably sensible position compared to head and waste. I would attach near center of chest, then maybe use sticks to limit how much the spine will bend.

[DeWittP · Accepted solution]

Really odd, I created a new project, re imported my photoshop file and its started to work like I wanted it too. Sometimes the simplest solutions work.