Why does my puppet have a slight twitch at the start of recording a dragger behaviour?

[philips33518885]

Hey, easiest thing to do is check this link Character Animator puppet twitching during record - YouTube

I've recorded a draggable behaviour on a sub-puppet arm, but all I want is a static 'hold in place' position to begin with.  However, when I play back the recording there is a slight twitch in the puppet's hand.  What is happening maybe? How could I fix it?

Cheers

Phil

[Jeff Almasol]

Hi Phil... Does blending the Dragger take reduce the twitch?

Also, do you need all of those Dragger behaviors? I'd think you should only need one at the top-level of the puppet, and just record poses as needed, maybe extending Draggable handle takes for the duration you want to hold a pose.

[CoSA_DaveS]

Thanks for your screen recording Phil. I have reproduced the problem here. It's a design flaw in how the puppet mesh responds to handle movement. Behind the scenes, the handle is being moved suddenly, and the twitch you see is the hand "relaxing" the mesh to adjust for the movement. This usually produces a nice weighty feel to the mesh changes, but in this case it's clearly not good.

As a workaround, all I can think of right now is to cover the bad frames with Transform's Opacity set to 0%. Timeline > Record 2-frame Take with the arm-for-record button for Opacity enabled can help with this.

Our internal tracking number for this issue is DVACH-1567

[philips33518885]

Hi CoSA_DaveS,

I think I understand what you mean.  It's like a 'pre-relaxing' is required before recording starts.

What I'm trying to achieve here is a perfectly looping sprite animation.  So I've realised I can just add a little extra time at the start of the loop to allow for the relaxing, then I can just drop those problem images from my PNG export when I create my sprite sheet.

Cheers!

[philips33518885]

Hi Jeff,

No, blending doesn't seem to help.  I need that arm to be stationary at the 'dragged to' position to begin with and a blend records movement from it's default position anyway.

I tried removing all but one dragger behaviour on the arm, and then all but the original puppet dragger behaviour, and I still had the issue.  It seems like I need to have multiple draggers though in order to see the results of the previous recordings.

Cheers

[alank99101739]

Did this issue get solved? I have the same issue, but its a pretty big twitch. I get around it by recording a MP4 file then using Premier Pro to remove the first few frames, but its not a very efficient way to work.

Here is an example frame by frame. The hands are supposed to be not visible, in front of the character (he is writing at the desk), but the hands are all over the place for the first few frames. (It looks like it broke his wrists! Painful!)  I assume hands are aligned with the default body position of the artwork before snapping around to their correct orientation due to the bones etc of the rigging.

Even a setting like "skip first 5 frames" as a setting it remembers would be helpful. Basically I would like it to stabilize before the actual frames of the scene start in the recording.  I tried various options with blending, but could not find a combination that solved the problem. I could defer the twitch, but it would not go away.

Frame 1: look at the two hands (you can see the fingers on both sides of body).

Frame 2:

Frame 3:

Frame 4: Note that the right arm is moving, but after frame 4 the hand is not visible.

Puppet default position rear view (if helpful)

Hmmmm. I have not tried changing the gap between the draggable and bones - I am too scared to change the rigging and potentially break/lose all my recordings, but maybe I can export and create a new project and experiment there. That may reduce the problem (but probably won't eliminate it).

[CoSA_DaveS]

> Even a setting like "skip first 5 frames" as a setting it remembers would be helpful

Yeah, that's our current thinking -- to add that as an option in a future version. We were considering trying to always do something like this behind the scenes, but there's an artistic choice in some cases. For example, if you are using the physics to simulate a pile of leaves, they'll settle for possibly many frames before coming to a standstill. Maybe you want to completely hide that settling, or want to see all of it. So you should have control as to how many frames to skip.

For now, the workaround is to do that trimming of the initial frames in AE or PPro.