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puppet expression
I am rigging a character in after effects CS4. This character has a jacket and on the jacket there are buttons dangling off strings. The buttons will be animated as an overlap when the character is moving. The jacket’s bottom piece will also move.
I need to find a way to parent the buttons to the MESH of the puppet pins that are assigned to the jacket.
I tried this expression:
L = thisComp.layer(“vest”);
L.toWorld(L.effect(“Puppet”).arap.mesh(“Ljacket_ctrl”).deform(“bottom_Jacket_ctrl”).position)so the only problem is that it attaches the layer to an assigned pin and not the mesh, so when the pin is moved, the layer attached to it “floats” around. I need the object to act as if it was “sewn” onto the mesh.
Any suggestions?
Cheers
Alon
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4 Replies
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try to find a way to call the puppet starch pins, if you are trying to do what you think you are doing. The puppet starch pins are used to tell how much of the mesh is affected by the pin, so if it can be called you could control any amount of the mesh. If it works you gotta show it!
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You can attach to the starch pins, but the problem is that they don’t move with the mesh.
Dan
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I think Dan is right.
It’s not the amount of control on the Mesh that I’m looking for. It’s the orientation and rotation of X to follow the Mesh’s distortion.I’m trying to get the buttons to be “sewn” on the jacket’s Mesh, not the pin.
I tried parenting two other pins to the pin that controls the jacket, and than parent the buttons to children of the controlling pin. But the same problem accrues, since the pins don’t posses rotation values.
Is there any way to assign an “anchor point” and a “rotation” value to a pin through expressions?
or set up a way to parent the buttons’ layer to the mesh’s distortion? -
The only thing I can think of would be to maybe precomp the jacket with another layer (which you would turn off or delete later) that adds points that you can track. Then have your buttons follow the tracking data.
Dan
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