Puppet distortion

Report · Apr 13, 2019

Hi all,

I'm very new to Character Animator and have attempted to make my own puppet. I made my puppet in Photoshop and then exported it to Animator. I'm running into an issue where when I try to record, the face of my puppet becomes extremely distorted. Does anyone know what is causing this? I haven't even gotten to moving body parts other than the face and am already discouraged. As far as I can tell, all the tags are in the correct positions. And the layer hierarchy should be correct as I used the Adobe Chloe puppet as a guide on how to organize my layers. I am grateful for any help or advice. Thanks in advance. Again, I'm a newbie...so be gentle. Ha ha.

I've attached images to show what's happening. The first image (in white) is what the puppet should look like. The other images are what's happening when I try to record.

Report · Apr 13, 2019

Hi! There are a few gotchas but normally once you have you first puppet going the second is much easier.

could you provide a screen shot of the rigging panel? What you see is normally due to a tag on a wrong layer. Each layer is controlled by something. If two behaviors try to control something problems occur (for non obvious reasons!!)

There is a mesh icon at bottom of scene window. If you turn this on it can help identify what is not moving. Once you find that point, look for a handle at that point and try deleting tags on it to see if you can identify the culprit.

feel free to ask follow up questions!

Report · Apr 13, 2019

Thanks for the reply! I did find duplicate tags in some areas (head, right eye) that I removed, but am still having distortion. Please let me know if you see any obvious errors. Appreciate the help. Thank you kindly!

bottom portion:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1doktSUllTAeQ3lIxpbG-pufKU26mapAK/view?usp=sharing

Report · Apr 13, 2019

By chance, if you set the Eyelid Strength parameter in the Face behavior to 0% does the distortion stop?

If you do not have any layers tagged Blink, the Face behavior tries to scale the height of the eyes. It can be really confusing and is easy to hit when making a new puppet (since one often doesn't make Blink alternates on the first pass).

I think in a recent version there was a change so it only happens with warp independent eyes so it was less likely to cause problems, but maybe it could still be that.

DT

Report · Apr 14, 2019

I am traveling this week without a computer, but some other things to check.

You have a Head layer inside the Head layer (towards the end). Duplicating the layer names can cause unexpected problems. The nested layer I would rename - Skull, Face, etc. Just not Head (and not “Nested Head” as if it contains “Head” it may be tagged automatically as well)
Your Left Eye has a nested layer called Left Eye 7— that might get tagged as Left Eye as well
Your Right Eye is not independent (but Left Eye is), plus has a nested Right Eye layer name.
Your Mouth has Neutral and Neutral 2 (both might get tagged neutral)
You have unofficial names under the Mouth group (Unhappy). Makes complete sense but does not work reliably (will cause problems). Instead, you need to create a layer (I have used ”Gob”) and put Mouth under that. Then Unhappy goes under Gob as well. Then create a swapset for all the children of Gob - so you trigger Unhappy via a keyboard trigger which hides Mouth. Under Mouth only put the offficial tag names (Ah, Uh, Neutral, Smile, ...) - they have tag names listed.

The mouth stuff is just confusing. The reason for it is the face behavior understands (1) web cam for Smile and Suprised, the LipSync behavior analyses sound for Ah, Oh, etc. The behaviors do not share well with other swap sets etc. so hide the whole Mouth layer instead.

As a side benefit, later you can do a happy set of mouth positions if you like (so all the mouth positions are smiling). You swap between complete sets of mouths.

Thanks for the mesh. Can you show the mesh while distorting? That is, turn on the mesh in the Scene view (rather than the rig view). If you move the puppet around, you should see some parts of the mesh not moving. That is what we are looking for - what does not move when the rest of the puppet does move.

I suspect you will want to do more work on the hair later. I notice the layers named “dangle”. If you want the hair to move without the head shape changing, then the hair that moves needs to be independent. I sometimes have the top section of the head hair not be independent , then create independent layers for the hair dangles at the side of the head. So the dangles (and fringe if one) moves, but are attached to unmoving hair on top of the head.