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Unable to Rig & Body Track customized puppet

Community Beginner ,
Jan 10, 2022 Jan 10, 2022

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I have no idea how to find a solution so please be kind, if this is a repeat technical question. For well over a year now, I've been trying to bring a customized puppet to life in Character Animator. I've followed Dave Werner's (and more) tutorials on rigging issues, how to rig, rigging for beginners, etc. and still for the life of me, I cannot bring this customized puppet to life. The only feature that works is the lip sync. I had a friend make the original illustration then I used a Chloe puppet template to isolate the layers in hopes there will be no issues in Character Animator. I've also tried to use the new Body Tracking feature, and still everything fails. I have no idea what the next steps are. I've lately been trying to bring this character life in After Effects but, with the amount of layers, movement, etc., the task seems too time consuming with the amount of content I'm hoping to publish with this character. Are there any options or insight? I would send the file to someone at Adobe to see if this is fixable but I don't know what else to do with this. Thank You.

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How to , Rigging

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LEGEND ,
Jan 10, 2022 Jan 10, 2022

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If you don't get a volunteer to look at the puppet, feel free to share screenshots of the rigging hierarchy here. There are a number of community volunteers that offer free advice. 

I would tackle one area at a time - moving arms, mouth, eyes, hair, hand positions etc. Once working, move on to the next area. First question is do you want multiple profiles. That is good to do early if so.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 11, 2022 Jan 11, 2022

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I'm new to asking for help with this but it's been so long trying to self-troubleshoot and I'm not sure what options are left. Here's a few screenshots from the rigging and what it looks like (no matter what) in the record section. The body tracking is even worse. The lips appear fine with the auto sync compute feature. I was going to end up making a face-only video as a last resort "solution." I would love to know if this is fixable and what option(s) there are. To my knowledge, I tagged and labeled everything "correctly," but clearly there is something wrong. Let me know if I should share any additional files/screenshots. 

 

Thank You.

 

 Screen Shot 2022-01-11 at 9.58.22 PM.pngScreen Shot 2022-01-11 at 10.07.15 PM.pngScreen Shot 2022-01-11 at 9.59.07 PM.pngScreen Shot 2022-01-11 at 9.58.38 PM.png

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 11, 2022 Jan 11, 2022

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Forgot to share what the layers/template looks like (based on Chloe).

 

Screen Shot 2022-01-11 at 10.15.32 PM.png

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LEGEND ,
Jan 11, 2022 Jan 11, 2022

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I would start by removing independence from the Body layer. As soon as ALL the children of a layer are independent (+Dizzy in this case), its almost certainly wrong. I should write a blog I guess on this because its a pretty common mistake and it is a bit confusing.

 

I like to describe it as you have sheets of thin rubber. (Sheet of rubber = mesh in official terminology.) CH puts artwork on the sheets of rubber and stretches them around to do movement with draggers etc. When you have a layer with the independent flag on, it starts a new sheet of rubber. How to keep the sheets joined? They need to overlap somewhere, and you have to attach the child sheet of rubber to the parent by dragging the origin marker of the child over the parent mesh where you want them joined.

 

If all the children are independent, there is nothing left in the parent to attach to! That is why Body should not be independent. The head, arms and legs need the body artwork to attach to.

 

(Side track: there are two ways to attach - weld and hinge. Weld is like putting a dob of glue where the two layers are attached. Rotating the parent layer will rotate the child as well. Hinge is like putting a thin pin through. It rotates where the pin is - rotating the parent does not rotate the child.)

 

So how to attach the layers? You drag the origin marker (say of the leg) and drag it over the torso. The torso should turn green to indicate attachment. In your case however, your "Torso" layer is also independent - so its not in the parent mesh so the only thing left in the Body mesh is the hips. So I suspect you want hips AND Torso layers NOT independent. That artwork will then be part of the Body layer mesh. (If you click on Body, you should see the yellow outline around everything in the mesh.)

 

Looking at the legs, you have Left Leg inside Left Leg where the child is independent. You can have independent legs if you want them to swivel, but you might find it works better without indpendence for your artwork. If you want it on however, select the independent layer and drag the "origin" marker (the circle with a dottle line) over the hips where the leg joins. It defaults to the center of the blue bounding box of the child artwork otherwise (you can see it there in the middle). Because it does not overlap the parent, it is not attached (and things go flying off).

 

Should your head be independent too? Maybe. But maybe not! Try it both ways, but make sure the origin marker is dragged over the neck artwork if independent. It can solve problems with the head not independent when it comes to hair behind the head that also needs to go behind the body.

 

Do you want all those hairs independent? Yes! It means the hair can bounce without the face artwork bouncing with it! That is a good example of independence.

 

Eyes? I would leave it as is and see how it goes. I usually have the eyes independent - as long as the face background is NOT independent so the eyes have something to attach to. Its normally arms and legs attaching to the body that needs the origins dragged around.

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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Sorry for the months late response. Life happened. Your advice is super helpful and I almost had a breakthrough this evening. The only thing I don't understand is why part of the "Face background" and mouth blends with the left arm when I animate using the dragger tool. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 12, 2022 Jan 12, 2022

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You need to move the hips layer beneath the torso layer or else the left arm will always appear behind the hips.

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