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Simple Rig Gone Awry
I’m trying to figure out how to do a nice, simple rig of a simple character. It’s one of those garbage-can-lid sorts of characters, where the whole top of the head flaps when he talks. This means that the eyes move when the mouth opens.
The way I currently have the scene set up is thus: Within the main composition, there’s the character composition. Within the character composition is the body, the lower jaw, the inside of the mouth and a composition for the top of the head, which contains the moveable pupils and eyelids. Within the character comp, I’ve used Puppet to make the head, jaw and mouth-back move together, though at this point it just goes from closed to open.
What I’m trying to do is have all the relevant controls for the character in the main comp. I’ve already got the pupils and eyelids controlled with expression controls on an adjustment layer. My initial idea was to control a Time Remap with an expression control to get the mouth movement, but that broke the ability to animate the pupils.
Basically my question is this: How do I distil all those Puppet modifiers, all moving at the same time but on different layers, into a single slider? This is my first attempt to rig a character this way, so I suspect there’s an obvious answer I’ve missed.
Thanks in advance!
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4 Replies
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You would use math to tie each puppet pin to a slider in your main comp. Each position of the pins would need to be range mapped from 0 to 1 on the slider to the beginning and final positions of the pins.
Linear() is the expression you’re looking for in AE.
Have fun!– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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that works! Quick follow-up: Is there a way to use the pick-whip to grab the current value of a property, rather than its expression identity? (as in, returning [100. 200] instead of transform.position).
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You can copy and paste.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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For future rigging I highly recommend duik tools – free and pretty well explained in their tutorials section.
https://duduf.net/?page_id=151
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
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