Controlling puppet head scale with a control?

[Marky Mark Marino]

Hi there - 

Is there a way to control just the head scale in a puppet so that I create a controller to allow me to manually make the head bigger/smaller WITHOUT using camera input on the Face behavior?  I'd like to link head scaling to a pitch wheel on a MIDI keyboard and I can't figure out how to do that.  I know I could scale the entire puppet this way with the Transform behavior, but I really just want to scale the head to emphasize certain parts of the dialog. 

[keiko.yamada]

Hi,

I will probably do this.
1) Duplicate "Head" group in Puppet panel.
2) Rename duplicated group. e.g. "Head_big"
3) In Rig workspace, select "Head_big" in Puppet panel, set Layer -> X/Y scale and position in Properties panel.
4) Create a new Swap set in Triggers panel.
5) Add both "Head" and "Head_big" to the same swap set created at step 4.
6) Set "Head" to Default.
7) Assign key to "Head_big". e.g. H

If you could modify the source file (add a new big head layer in the source file) instead of duplicating in CH, it would be better in the long run. If so, you need only step 4-7.

Hope this helps.

[CoSA_DaveS · Accepted solution]

Another option: apply an additional Transform behavior to just the Head group, then drag its Scale slider into the Controls Panel (in Layout mode) and assign it to your MIDI control by touching the physical knob while the slider is still selected in the Controls Panel.

[Marky Mark Marino]

This is exactly what I wanted to achieve, thanks!  Now the only minor issue I've encountered is that I can map the head's Scale slider to the modulation wheel on my cheap MIDI keyboard with no problem but it cannot be mapped to the Pitch wheel, which is preferable b/c it snaps back to center when you let go of it.  I'm guessing that maybe CA just can't detect the Pitch wheel being moved.  Maybe the pitch wheel isn't handled the same way as the other slider controls on the MIDI keyboard? 

FYI - I got the cheapest MIDI keyboard I could find on Amazon (midiplus AKM320 32 key MIDI Keyboard Controller for $40) just to try it out for triggering things in CA and it's working great for that. Totally plug and play (at least on the Mac it was).  Much better than using the computer keyboard which requires focus to be on CA to register [mostly this is an issue for live streaming when CA might not have focus].

[alank99101739]

I am surprised but no shocked. MIDI events are basically numbers sent over the wire. There is both what whas pressed and how much (e.g. velocity of a key or how far a slider goes). I would have thought th4 pitch wheel would have also generated slider like MIDI events, but if it does work... shrug

[Marky Mark Marino]

I ran into another issue, that I have resolved.  When trying to record the head scale performance, CA was giving me the message "Parameter not armed, value won't be recorded." whenever I moved the modulation wheel and the peformance was not captured.  I realized that in the Controls panel, for the slider control, I needed to click on the little recording dot in the upper right of the Scale control to arm it for recording first.  Just thought I'd point that out if anyone runs into this in the future.

[Marky Mark Marino]

The downside of this method for my situation is that I want the head to scale smoothly rather than just jumping between regular head/big head sizes.  But thanks for the suggestion!

[Marky Mark Marino]

The downside of this method for my situation is that I want the head to scale smoothly rather than just jumping between regular head/big head sizes.  But thanks for the suggestion!