parenting of Puppet Pins

[Moira Elefson]

Can’t you not just pickwip the pin you need to the expression box? I think that should work..

[Henadzi Buto]

No, it does not suit, because first the child pin moves away from its place. And second this pin can’t be positioned on its own as it is locked by amounts of the parent pin. Therefore it is not а parenting.

[Filip Vandueren]

This “kinda” works:


myParent=effect("Puppet").arap.mesh("Mesh 1").deform("Puppet Pin 2").position;
myParent + (value-myParent.valueAtTime(0))


The problem is that the puppet pin that has this expression can not be dragged around without weird stuff happening.
The same thing happens if you mimic parenting with normal layers via expressions.

The best way is to scrub it’s values in the timeline.

—

Alternatively,
you could set up a bunch of Null layers with true parenting, 1 Null for each pin.

– Start by creating enough Nulls, it might be easier to make them 50×50 and put the anchorpoint at 25,25.
– Parent all these Nulls to your puppeted layer.
– Copy the position of your first puppet pin to the position of your first Null, they should line up exactly.
– Rename the Null to “Pin 1”
– repeat for All Nulls.
– Unparent all the Nulls
– Now create the correct Parenting relation between all the pin-Nulls.
– and then give the puppet points an expression like:


l=thisComp.layer("Pin 1");
fromComp(l.toComp(l.anchorPoint))


“Pin 1” being the name of the correct Null layer.

This has a huge benefit: you have true parenting including scaling and rotation.
And you can still use expressions on these Nulls like Wiggle or Smooth,etc.

[Henadzi Buto]

Filip, thanks a lot for this help!

I have tryed your first method and yes, something happens when moving this pin.
But the second method works perfect even with more manipulations. What is more these nulls look like handles making selection of pins much easier.