• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Trying to parent a puppet pin to another layer… breaks when I move the character?

  Posted by Brent Taylor on April 11, 2014 at 3:34 am

  Hey guys… I’ve tried to do this a variety of ways and none of them seem to work out. Using CS4.

  I’ve got a skeleton character I’m animating. For his spine, I’m using the puppet pin tool. I want to parent the top node to his head, so that when I move his head, the pin follows. I’ve tried a few methods.

  The first is an expression I got from a tutorial video:

  BONE=”Name of Bone Layer”
  A=thisComp.layer(BONE);
  B=A.toComp(A.anchorPoint);
  fromComp(B)

  Then I just change the “Name of Bone Layer” to “Head.” But this doesn’t work for some reason. As soon as I enter it, the top of the spine shoots of in a stranger direction, as though I’d just tried to parent it to the “position” or “anchor point” on the Head.

  Next, I tried a modified expression from another tutorial video:

  thisComp.layer(“Head”).toComp([35,28.6])

  This (or so I thought) anchored the pin to a specific point on the Head layer. This works great! Until I change the position of the whole body (both head and the spine). Then it just stops working.

  Tried again with THIS expression from our nice forum here:

  L=thisComp.layer(“Head”); L.toWorld(L.anchorPoint);

  But it did the same thing as #2… worked great until I move the spine, and then it breaks.

  Any ideas?

  Brent Taylor replied 12 years, 4 months ago 1 Member · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Brent Taylor

  April 11, 2014 at 5:11 am

  Update: I am not sure why, but for some reason deleting the spine and re-importing it has fixed the problem. I’m using the very first expression I listed now and everything seems to be ok. How strange. At least it’s working.
• 

  Brent Taylor

  April 11, 2014 at 5:16 am

  Ahh… now it works great unless I select Continuous Raster… what the heck…

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