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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects CS3 Puppet tool

  • CS3 Puppet tool

    Posted by Leonardo Weiss on May 2, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    I’ve been using the puppet tool for a while now and it has been very useful in many projects, however, I just finished doing a 30 second short and some of the layers that had the puppet tool effect on them looked chopped up, like I masked out certain bits of the layer. I removed the puppet tool and the bits disappeared, clearly it was the puppet tool messing things up. How do you get rid of this without having to reanimate everything, which is what I am doing now?

    Darby Edelen replied 18 years ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Jason Milligan

    May 2, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    Take a look at your mesh for the object.
    Modifying the number of triangles and/or the expansion can solve this problem.
    You may have to reapply the pins although to get the mesh to update.

  • Darby Edelen

    May 3, 2008 at 7:31 pm

    The puppet tool’s mesh is determined by masks, if there is no mask on the layer then AE first runs auto-trace on the object to generate a mask from the alpha.

    If you don’t like the results of this automatic auto-trace, you can run your own auto-trace before using the puppet tool to get a better mesh. If the object you are auto-tracing is a still image you can just auto-trace the current frame, if it is animated or video footage then you’ll need to auto-trace the work area (which may take a while).

    Also, the ‘On Transparent’ check box in the Puppet tool will make anything outside of these masks transparent.

    Darby Edelen
    Lead Designer
    Left Coast Digital
    Santa Cruz, CA

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