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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects puppet tool won’t work

  • puppet tool won’t work

    Posted by Leah Albert on November 2, 2009 at 1:19 am

    Hello gurus, I’m teaching myself After Effects and need to learn a lot fast. Have only started so please explain any solution as if to a 3 year old, still working out where things are and what they do. When I try to place pins on my image (imported as footage from a .ai vector file or a .psd file) the cursor turns into a white arrow with a white square next to it. Wondering what I’m doing wrong.
    Thanks for any help.
    Regards,
    Leah.

    Jason Coleman replied 1 month ago 17 Members · 18 Replies
  • 18 Replies
  • Todd Kopriva

    November 2, 2009 at 4:10 am

    The pointer icon that you describe is the one that appears when the pointer is outside of the outline/mesh that contains the Puppet pins. (It’s the one in the third list item on this page.)

    Does the pointer change to a different icon when you put it inside of an outline?

    If you need some help learning the basics of using the Puppet tools, I recommend watching the videos linked to from the “Puppet tools overview and resources” page.

    ———————————————————————————————————
    Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
    putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
    ———————————————————————————————————
    If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

  • Luke Regan

    November 30, 2009 at 9:40 pm

    Hi,

    I had a similar problem. When I clicked on the object with the puppet pin tool the cursor changed to white with a small white square by it and no puppet mesh showed up on the image. When I checked under effects puppet was listed but none of the options with it showed up and also I wasn’t able to add any more pins.

    The layer I was trying this on had a mask, apparently the puppet tool doesn’t work with masked layers since as soon as I deleted the mask the puppet tool then worked. Check your layers to make sure there are no masks. If there are any effects or anything on the layer I’d turn them off and try the tool, do a little experimenting since something similar may be not allowing the puppet pin tool to work.

  • Todd Kopriva

    November 30, 2009 at 9:49 pm

    This page describes how the Puppet tool interacts with paths already on a layer. Basically, if you already have masks on a layer, the Puppet effect is expecting you to click within one of them to define a mesh within that outline.

    ———————————————————————————————————
    Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
    putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
    ———————————————————————————————————
    If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

  • Robert Morris

    February 17, 2010 at 7:35 pm

    Luke, your post here was VERY helpful… though it didn’t solve my problem immediately. I wish I could say that Todd’s (Adobe) post was helpful at all, but it really wasn’t addressing this specific problem. Anyway, I had the same issue both you and Leah were having. I was trying to apply pins to a photoshop image sequence with an alpha channel. In theory, I should have no problem doing this. But all I would get is the white arrow with a square next to it, the “Puppet” effect applied to the layer, but no pins. The problem seems to be that the auto-trace wasn’t working to allow Puppet to define the edge of the image. So what I did was actually draw a rough mask shape around my object (which was the PSD sequence) and then applying the Puppet tool worked as it should. Luke, you said the tool wasn’t working when you had a mask applied. So perhaps trying it both ways will resolve some issues people are having. I hope these posts help someone else in the future.


    Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D

  • Andrew Minett

    January 5, 2011 at 4:49 pm

    Thanks for this post, Robert. I was having some frustrating issues with an image and the puppet pin tool with it only outlining areas surrounding a white section of the image even with a defined alpha channel. I drew a mask around the whole image and this allowed me to put a pin in the white problem area which defined a mesh as drawn by the mask shape.

    I have my suspicions that there is some underlying issue with the puppet pin tool and the way a rasterized image is layered before flattening. In any case your method works!

    Regards,
    Andrew

    https://www.meldmedia.com

  • Hayley Akins

    December 15, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    It seems that sometimes having masks on the layer solve the problem and sometimes it causes the problem. In my case it solved my problem! thanks guys very helpful. I would love to know why this is if anyone knows?

    Thanks

  • Lord Kaos

    January 27, 2012 at 7:16 pm

    Hi! I´ve to problems with puppet pins.

    First, in a null object, crating a chain of null objects I need to set a pin in each top left corner of the dummy…I don´t know why it doesn´t add more than 2 pins…sometimes three in my working layer (a video layer) but I want to reference to some coordinate of the border of the null objects (repeat: standing in my video layer)

    If I try the same over a null object, then I can add as many pins as I want…what may be happening?

    And after that…when trying to parent the position of my pin to the position of the null object, I don´t see the properties that should appear after clicking the stop clock in the pin layer…clicking the clock only adds or remove keyframe, but doesnt display the parenting tools.

    Some suggestion?

    Thanks!

  • Aza Allen

    July 11, 2013 at 5:21 pm

    I am having this issue… I can’t figure out why!

    I have a photoshop image of a skeleton that I cut out and it now has an alpha channel.

    I imported the PSD file into AE CS6 and dropped it into my comp.

    I go to the Puppet pin tool and then I click on the skeleton, I immediately hear the Windows 7 error “bing” and then the arrow with a square icon shows up as my tooltip (instead of the pin), and I’m unable to place pins, but the effect shows up under my layer in the timeline…

    I even tried masking off the image to see if that would help, and nothing!

    Please help!

    Thanks all

    My portfolio can be seen at http://www.ruesterprod.com
    My personal website is http://www.azaallen.com

  • Micz Kicz

    February 3, 2015 at 2:04 am

    In my case the same problem was caused by too large PSD file used as a composition. When I’ve changed resolution of my PSD file from 10000×8000 to 2000×1600, and then imported it into AE CS6 as a composition – everything started to work.

    Creative Creature 🙂

  • Földváry András

    June 3, 2017 at 4:37 pm

    Well, I had got this situation too, and well the mask layer solution is basically helped place my pins, but after that, when i want to use my duik plugin, it messed up the whole comp.
    So I given it the old way solution. CLOSE THAT THING, and start a new project. Not to restart the program, but create a whole new project.
    And now its working. Just the way it should be. So, I know its a bit COMPlicated (sorry for that ???? ), but its working, and after that you can also import the working project back to your old project, and continue your work.

    I hope it helps!

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