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Puppet Pins Inconsistent on Loop
Hi Guys,
I’m trying to do something fairly straightforward, but I’m at the end of my tether with this one and need some serious expert-level help!
Bascially, I’m trying to animate a long thin dragon graphic along a path in the shape of an infinity sign.
First I tried using separate segments following the path, but AE started grumbling once I’d hit about 100 layers. Then I tried the puppet tool, dropping a row of evenly-spaced pins along my source image and using expressions to get each pin to track along the path. Easy enough, and superquick to render. My problem though, is that the puppet tool consistently kinks the layer along two quadrants. I wondered if my dragon artwork was confusing the puppet tool somehow, so I replaced the dragon with a simple patterned bar I made in Photoshop, which behaved exactly the same way as you can see below:
The pattern loops around smoothly, but always kinks at the bottom-left and top-right parts of the loop.
Please note that I have already tried different Triangle Counts, Extensions and Starch on the Puppet Mesh, as well as increasing the number of Pins from 8 to 32, and the kinks still appear in the same places.
Any ideas?
Thomas
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2 Replies
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There’s an old plugin that does exactly that. I’m not sure if it still works in the current versions of AE. Its called omino snake.
How I would do that though is by drawing that shape in a 3d app (with a spline and a sweep), load it up in element 3d. apply the texture and animate the texture’s offset property. Fast and clean.
Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com -
Thanks Cassius,
Omino Snake worked (almost) perfectly with my CS6 comp. The only limitation was that my 4000px dragon was too long, so I ended up having to cut it into two sections to work with Omino Snake’s 2000px limit.
Thomas
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