When the mouth moves the face now distorts with it

[DarrenFMc]

Hi,

My puppet working fine up to last night when I saved to finish for the evening. This morning when I reopend Character Animator, when I checked the lipsyncing, the mouth works fine but both the mouth and the face now moves and distorts. I cannot seem to figure what happened? Any first suggestings?

[ElectroPuppet]

Hi Macnimation,

Looks like something out of a horror film!! AGGH

My guess is jaw set to 100%. In rig mode, go over to 'Lip Synch' and try setting the jaw to something like 30%.

You could also check that all your tags are correct.

Also try turning mesh mode on and see if you have some random artwork that is causing the distortion.

Hope one of those suggestions help!

[DarrenFMc]

Thanks for the reply.

Completely lost and confused now. No reference to lipsyncing at all in the Rig Mode.

I closed the project and reopended it again and now the mouths do not work, stuck on the neutral moth and still stretches...

[ElectroPuppet]

Don't panic! It can all seem a bit overwhelming when things start going haywire - but it's worth figuring out.

Closing and reopening Character Animator won't change anything. But if you are doing anything in your source artwork, like making changes or switching layers off that were previously on, that can affect how it displays in Character Animator.

In rig mode, if you select your puppet, you should see lip synch over on the right of screen. Under behaviours.

Just check that it has jaw set to something low. (like 30%)

If it isn't the jaw, turn on the show mesh checkbox (it is at the bottom of your puppet window) that should give you a yellow mesh that fits over your puppet. If the yellow mesh is bigger than your puppet - then you probably have something floating around on one of your mouth layers that is causing the distortion.

Don't forget - there is also a history panel in Character Animator - so if you think everything was working in an earlier version, you can always use that to jump back to an earlier point of your work. But it is always best to figure out what is causing the problem and fix it. Otherwise you never learn 🙂

Good luck!

[alank99101739]

Sharing a screenshot of the "rig" hierarchy can help too... sometimes. It shows the puppet tree structure and which layers are independent, where behaviors have been added etc.

[alank99101739]

To look for property settings, click on the puppet icon in the rig panel *above* the hierarchy. I think there should be a little lego block with a number like 8 next to it. These are the "global" behaviors in the puppet (not attached to a layer). The properties panel (normally on the right) will then shows all the behaviors that are global, which should include Lipsync (or a nutcracker jaw behavior instead if that is being used).

Another thing you can try is in the scene window there are two little arrows in a circle. This is the "refresh" button. If you hold down ALT and click this, it wipes lots of internal caches. VERY rarely a cache gets corrupted and things don't make sense (more when power goes off while using CH). But its easy to do and has fixed problems sometimes so worth giving a shot.

[DarrenFMc]

Thanks for the advice. Everything looks fine and nothings seems out of place. There are no Errors or warnings. When I closed and reopened again, the characters eyes suddenly decided not to recognise the masking around the eyes and the daggle options stopped working but the mouth worked again so something was going on with the application. As I am only the character design and trigger stage I decided to start a new project and reimportaned the character again and everything worked fine as expected so I think Character Animation itself was having  bit of a moment. Lets see what happens and again thanks for all the effort and suggestions.