I was trying to understand what you meant by "remove the black screen". Are you using chromakey techniques? I assume that is why "linear color key" means. There are better approaches than this (which can have unexpected side effects like what you say). (1) You can drag scenes from CH to AE which creates a "dynamic link". Then all the transparencies will just work (but its sluggish to use). AE uses the CH code to render the frames as needed. (2) You can export sequences of PNG image files (which supports transparency) and then import the sequence into AE (3) You can export a video using the "GoPro CineForm RGB 12 bit with alpha" encoder, which generates a video file with transparencies preserved. But I would recommend you don't use tricks like "Linear color keys" and instead use an approach that supports alpha channels (transparencies) natively. ... View more

Well, interesting.... so it is a git repo.... I am going to do a bit of Google hunting on git repos to see if there is a way to recover it.  Looks like it lost the "refs/heads/master" file when it crashed. (Most people say throw away your .git directory and start again...) $ git --git-dir=repo.noindex fsck --full error: Invalid HEAD Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done. error: refs/heads/master: invalid sha1 pointer 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 error: refs/heads/v107_1.1.1: invalid sha1 pointer 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 notice: No default references ... View more

I ended up cheating myself. I could not get the walk behavior to my liking, so I do waist upwards shots now for walking. That is, you cannot see the legs move. Episode 1 - Friendship - Teaser 1 - YouTube   So maybe use the official walk behavior for side ways walks and a close up for walking towards the camera (you just move the puppet yourself, not the walk motion).  I often blend the Transform/Scale value to make it look like the character is coming closer. ... View more

I just reread your original request, and your point 8 was “you can pin things to the parent”.  For you question of pinning things together, have you thought about having nested independent groups then using pins to connect the nested group to the parent group? You can add different behaviors (e.g. different gravity or wind settings) to try and make them dangle a bit different Etc. The other idea if they are not overlapping (two separate things dangling) I am guessing you could do a transparent rectangle to connect the two dangles. So it looks separate, but they are connected with transparent objects. ... View more

A little more info, I think the distortion is the purple line on the left, where I think (!!) would like it to be more like the right (or not curved at the top?). Its the weird bump down in the middle causing problems. The green shows the bottom eyelid having the same problem, it has a strange bump up in the middle. (The bottom eye lid is much smaller however in this case.) ... View more

Interesting. Okay from looking at Dude, warp independent on the eyelids causes them to slide up/down independently, rather than warping the eyeball between the eyelids. Makes sense. In my case I don't think this is appropriate. The eyelid flattening off is a more natural look. It is also a problem with some other eyes as the bottom eyelid and top eyelid touch - having them slide up and down would look weird.  (Note, these eyes I have not got to close very much actually - maybe the shape or size is not friendly to the eyelid workings?) Back to the first example, I think I understand what is going on. I put a transparent rectangle as part of the eyelid. You can see the warp shape it is using. It looks like a straight line on both sides to a point in the middle. This had eyelid strength at 45. Cranking it up to 112% (random value!) you get some "interesting" effects! Eye open... - actually looks curved up in the middle! Eye slightly closed - interesting the warp shape again, it dips in the middle, but looks a bit curved. Eye closed In my case I guess I want a linear line along the top - I just want it all to squish straight down, not have the funny kink in the middle, or have the curve at the top going the other way (a U shaped curve). ... View more

Thanks for the quick response! I was after the eye control (gives more expression) so setting to 0% is what I am trying to avoid. I mean the dip in the middle is annoying, but the extra control is useful. Currently I have the following things independent. Which ones are you suggesting I change? For example, if I make "Left Eyelid Top" independent then when the eye lid goes down you can see the pupil above the eyelid (its not masked out any more). The eye opening is also visible above the eye lid.  (You can also see the bottom eyelid, the short horizontal black line, sneak up into the pupil.) Thanks again! ... View more

You can, but it works better if you do a bit of massaging afterwards in order for eyes and mouths to work. I took photos of a stuffed toy. I then photoshopped out the mouth and eyes. I then added them back as layers in the Photoshop file. (I split the head from the body as well, but I did not really need to do that.)  (Actually, this was not the final file - I cannot find it just now - but hopefully +Left Eye gives enough of a clue.) So when turned on it looks sensible again. But Ch can move the eyes and mouth etc. I only did one eye above, the "Left" eye (on the right above). Character animator does all the clipping etc to make it look correct. My son then did a quick video Wookies! - YouTube ... View more

Answers in case it helps. 1. Pinning stuff together: I have not seen that. Yes, it would be nice to have! 2. Eyelids: I think they are used to do blinks, I suspect could also effect if you use the camera to control how opened/closed eyes are, but not sure. 3. Eye wideness: No eye-dea. (Sorry, could not help it!) 4. More rigid body: You can try putting bones at places in the body to control this somewhat. Sometimes I put pins on the shoulders so the neck bends but the rest of the body does not. I found useful to experiment with putting pins right on the edge vs in a bit from the edge - makes a different to how the image stretches. E.g. top of shoulder I tend to pin right at the edge, but under the arm I pin in a bit from the edge. 5. Workflow: I put different puppets in different files. Ch can get confused with different things in one file, even when hidden. It does bounding box calculations at times for example, to work out how big something is before distorting it, or working out the center. 6. Vector artwork: I went with Illustrator for this reason (not photoshop) - so it can scale better. I think hires photos is your only other choice. Note, I still render as bitmaps (there is an option to render as bitmaps or vectors) because some gradients don't work when rendering as vectors. ... View more

In case helpful, to get a smoother transition (I struggle to move the mouse evenly!!) you can record the end position using a single keyframe, extend the take (make it longer by dragging it out in the line line), then using a blend to get a smooth transition from the start to the end. ... View more

The record-1-frame option (you mentioned it recently in another thread too) is one I am going to explore more with blending. I do think that has potential. Leveraging what is in the timeline already would be useful too - I look forward to that feature. It would be nice at times to hover the cursor or move the timeline pointer and see the current values for a take (e.g. x,y). Not a show stopper, but convenient at times. I did not notice for blends the ability to follow beizer or linear (straight line) at the start/end of blends. Normally the current model of smooth transitions is right. But when say walking for a longer blend (to move the puppet between two locations) the gradual transition looks a little funny (puppet velocity slows down, but legs are going at same speed). Having the choice of linear vs curve for blend in/out would be nice (I did not notice it there already). The curved blend is the right default choice. But with blends being effectively key-framing, linear (no curve) is useful at times too. (Or have I missed that one too?). Or maybe ability to control the % length of the in/out blend curve (with 0% being linear). But maybe again New Hold Take maybe I can splice the current take into three and control the blend curve length that way? (Today shorter blends = shorter curves) Thanks for the feedback! ... View more

I tried smoothing, but I found it still moved around, just...smoother. I still could not make the puppet stare straight ahead. I guess more than 9 positions could help - its still rounding off the position to remove jitters. I guess you would always want to look straight ahead, so it would be 5x5 instead of 3x3 grid? Obviously you could not do all positions with keyboard short cuts any more. However I am not sure it would be worth the effort. Also 5x5 would not give smooth eye pans - it would be jerky ones. I was trying for a smooth eye pan then a hold at the end in whatever direction it was looking at (then more pans etc). One thing I discovered after posting this is the “keyboard strength” setting for eye movements. That is, I can change how far the puppet looks to the left. That helped a bit. I can then pan eye positions by blending the keyboard strength maybe... A bit painful to use however. Why Am I asking for this?  I just had an example where a puppet’s eyes were trying to track a moving object. It actually looked quite good when the eyes were moving. You could not notice any jitter. Its just when the eyes stopped moving, then jitter became obvious. It is clear the eyes are not holding still. Or is there a way to freeze the current eye positions? E.g. record a take, then somehow lay over the top a take that says to “hold position” to lock the eyes. I would not mind having a keyboard trigger for example to freeze current eye position (stop getting inputs from camera) - I look around with my eyes (with smoothing on to help) then press a trigger when my eyes stop moving to tell it “lock the eyes here”. Just kicking around ideas. But a keyboard to lock the eyes plus smoothing might work quite well. To me, however its possible, success is being able to do a smooth eye pan then stop moving the eyes and have them look in that direction without any movement (smoothness does not stop movement - just makes the transition smoother) - which is annoying to look at).  Right now the camera, no matter how still I sit looking at one spot on the screen, is picking up eye movements (or making them up when they don’t really exist). Thanks for thinking about this! ... View more

Your welcome. I was trying for the policy if one person helps me on the boards with my problems, then try to help two others in return as payback. ... View more

I am suspicious about the left and right blink being in the same sub-group. I normally put the blink in the same group as the eye its replacing - I thought it hid the following stuff when it blinked. That might be causing the right blink to go away?  (I am just guessing here.)  I would suggest trying moving Left Blink inside the "left eye" group", and Right Blink in the right eye group - or introduce another set of groups under Eyes. But it does look clean. I am just not sure it will work having left and right blink in the same group. (You need the help of a master puppet Samuri for that!) ... View more

Cool! I had not discovered that encoder before!  "QuickTime" / "GoPro CineForm RGB 12-bit with alpha" is what I tried (and it worked).  220MB .MOV file instead of 27MB .mp4 file, but it was a movie file with transparency intact! ... View more

Visibility Variables!  I did not know they existed!  Thanks, I am giving them a try - very interesting and certainly saves on the clicking things one by one! Thanks! ... View more

I guess what I am calling "eyeball" is really "eyehole" as you say. If I really did have an eyeball behind it all (which should be clipped by the eyehole as well), then that *would* make sense as the pupil range...  But what i have is working for me, so I ain't gonna touch it now!!!   😉 ... View more

Regarding why your try of Dave's did not work, I think you need another group around the left eye and right eye - or try moving all the hair before the clipping mask. I think the clipping mask uses EVERYTHING following in the same layer. Because your hair is in the same group as the clipping mask, and below it, it will get messed up. You can control the scope of the mask with another level of grouping, or reorder so the minimal stuff follows the mask. ... View more

Illustrator hierarchy in case useful for an eye (different puppet). If you look closely you can see the shapes of the objects in the icons. The eyelid top and bottom etc is stretched slightly differently for wider (surprised) and narrower (angry), so all three have to exactly align (eyelid top, eyelid bottom, eyeball).  (I just discovered Illustrator visibility variables, that I might try to use to make it quicker to flip between the three views - I keep turning them on/off by hand at present, which is a real drag.) Oh, the about snipped I made the Pupil Range object visible (normally hidden) above just to show that the range of the pupil can go outside the eyeball. If the eyeball is the pupil range I don't think you will ever get the pupil being clipped. Normally the pupil range circle is hidden. ... View more

There are probably different ways to do it - I just stopped searching when I got one working (!!).  Yes, that video you mention is exactly where I got maskiong from. However I did things a little differently from the video as pointed out. I created the slightly off-white color eyeballs and that is what you can see the pupils in front of. (Actually, I don't quite understand why the green masks in the video are completely replaced by white with blue eyes.) So you can both see my eyeballs (sitting behind the pupil) *and* it is acting as my mask at the same time. In my case I did not want to mask the top and bottom eyelids - so I put them in front of the eyeball and pupil. So the eyeball masking is only for the pupil. It seemed the most natural to me in the end - the eyeball (really, the eyeball opening in the skin of the face) is clipping the pupil. Eyelids (and lashes) sit in front of that, unaffected by clipping (on your real face they are in front). That way eyelashes etc are not clipped - I can draw them anywhere. I then created different shaped eyeballs sublayers for the different expressions (neutral, angry, surprised). I swap the top eyelid, bottom eyelid, and eyeball all together using trigger sets. ... View more

Interesting idea - drop a comment here if it works well for you!  I do the full puppet because of the dangles (gravity) on hair, clothes etc you can set up. But I agree - the lack of key frames is painful in Ch. This is my hacky Ch keyframe work around if any use. I work out the x,y,scale values for the start and end of a transition I want - I write down the coordinates on paper. I then set the coordinates to the starting position for the puppet, hit the start recording button, type in the end values I want, let it record for a few seconds of the final state (I completely ignore timing with the rest of the scene when doing this), then stop recording. I now have a recording with the last few seconds being the correct final x,y,scale for my movement. I then trim all the start of the recording off (the left side of the take) so I just have the last few seconds left. I then extend the right size (lengthen) the take. For x,y,scale it remembers the last value when you stretch a take. So I now can stretch and position the take to whatever length I need. Then finally, I use the blend to transition to the new values. That does a poor mans key framing for x,y,scale inside Ch!  It is painful, but then I get all the hair dangles etc. I use it on a background image for example to do panning. Episode 1 - Friendship - Teaser 1 - YouTube   I also use it to make characters bob up and down for walking simulation (with hair bounces). (This example does not have much hair movement, but if you look closely near the collar you can see some.) I found the built in walk movements did not suit my needs. The little blue humps below (blending start and end) is how I got the bobbing motion for the character. I duplicate the take per step. Then the second purple scale transform blend is how the background zoomed out. The thing I like about Ch is you can scrub through a scene real time, even on my laptop. Other tools like Ae needed to render the scene (slow). So I try and do as much as possible in Ch these days, then use the other tools only for things Ch cannot do. ... View more