Puppet Pin to Puppet Pin Parenting

[Dan Ebberts]

You need a reference point. If you’re keyframing the parent pin, you can probably use its position at time 0 as the reference:

parentPin = effect(“Puppet”).arap.mesh(“Mesh 1”).deform(“Puppet Pin 1”).position;
delta = parentPin.valueAtTime(0) – valueAtTime(0);
parentPin – delta

Dan

[Steve Bentley]

Have you seen this?
https://rainboxprod.coop/en/tools/duik/
If you are working with puppet tools this free script/interface makes it a dream.
It’s doing exactly what Dan is suggesting but looking after all the under the hood expressions for you. You could code it yourself with expressions but this fine gentleman has done it for you.
And you get a really good IK that just makes puppeting easy – and gives you nulls to stand in for your puppet points that you CAN link with just the parent tool.
As for learning curve, by the time you watch the three tutorials you will be up and running.

It feels like cheating!

[Drew Shields]

Thanks everybody!

Dan, your information was especially helpful. I modified the expression slightly to reference another layer in the comp.

I’m using this for facial motion capture, where one set of pins/points effects the movement of another. The tutorials I’ve seen online so far require the two sets of facial tracking points to be exactly on top of one another. This line of code will allow me to have a normal human face effect a face with cartoonish proportions!

Take care,

Drew

parentPin = thisComp.layer("Shape Layer 2").effect("Puppet").arap.mesh("Mesh 1").deform("Puppet Pin 1").position;
delta = parentPin.valueAtTime(0) - valueAtTime(0);
parentPin - delta