Using puppet tool with pre comps

Adobe After Effects

Using puppet tool with pre comps

Posted by John Hammond on April 16, 2009 at 2:54 pm

Hi guys.

I have been doing some simple character animation.

I have always found that setting up a cut-out style character for animation can be tedious and fiddly. I can rig it ok, setting up pivot points for limbs and creating a parent heirachy from torso through to upper arm, forearm, hands and fingers. What I have struggled with is creating the actual character illustrations, so that limbs join up ok and don’t have visible seams, and making sure the seams/joins look ok at both rotation extremes.

Also, I am not too keen on the ‘cut-out’ style look. I look at the old classic animation and love the flex in the bodies – something that is often missed out in new digital animation.

So, what I have started to do is do my animation is use a ‘2 pass’ method.

For the project I am working on now the animation is simple. A woman, shot from the waist up, whacks a volley ball with her arms. The arms were drawn in photoshop as separate layers, and I combined the body and arms in after-effects, setting pivots and parenting the arms to the body.

OK, so there’s my first pass. I animate the arms as needed.

Now, I Precomp the character. Then, to the precomp I add the puppet tool, setting up just 3 puppet points, and a starch point at the hips. I used to always get stuck here as things behaved oddly once the puppet was animated (limbs disappearing behind invisible non-existent limbs..?). I then realised that by turning up mesh expansion I could fix this.

Now, I animate the character’s waist to bend. This acts as a second layer of animation, retaining my original rigged limb animation.

So, I get the best of both worlds. The ease and speed of rigged limbs, and the nice flexible motion of the waist. All with just one original .PSD (which the illustrators I work with appreciate 🙂 ).

So – the point of this post is to ask if other people use this ‘2 pass’ method. I am also wondering how far it could be taken. Full character rigs, walk cycles..? what are the limitations of this technique? are there in-depth tutorials? Am I only scratching the surface of it’s potential?

Thanks,

Jack Cloud replied 14 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

John Hammond
April 16, 2009 at 4:12 pm

Ah yes I do remember seeing that tutorial about flowing air across a car..

Since I posted I have taken the technique further..

I have used Puppet to animate an arm at the elbow, nice and bendy!

Then pre-comped the arm and used a cut-out style animation with anchor points and heirachy to attach the pre comp to a body, and added rotation animation to the arm here.

Then pre comped the lot again,

Then to this pre-comp used puppet tool again to animate the waist, with lots of flex and bend.

So far it’s working OK, though I am still testing on a simple character rig.

One limitation I have encountered is that I am doing layers of animation in different comps. I.E animating wrist + forearm in one pre-comp, shoulder joint in another, and waist in yet another. Having it all separate means that if I change say, the timing of the animation of the wrist, I have to navigate to all the the other comps to change other key frames. I think good planning and use of storyboards and dope sheets, and a good mental vision and mental breakdown of the motions will make life easier.

John
John Hammond
April 16, 2009 at 4:50 pm

This did cross my mind.. I shall report back on how it went after I have done some real animation using this ‘cut out + puppet’ method.

Personally, I’m not a great drawer. I’m move of a techie – more comfortable writing expressions than using a pencil. Bad, I know. I wish I stuck with art at school! Luckily I am working with some illustrators – however they are not animators.

John
Tero Ahlfors
April 19, 2009 at 4:01 pm

I’ve made some animation with a layered photoshop robot thingy. The most easiest way for me was to make an expression control for the robot comp, pickwhip the different body (or robot) parts to the controls (and name them) and finally lock the expression effect window somewhere so you can change the values in whichever comp you might be.
John Hammond
April 20, 2009 at 9:48 am

good stuff. Thanks for the expressions idea, that solves the issue of having to travel up and down different compositions when animating a single character.
Jack Cloud
August 26, 2011 at 12:33 am

Hey guys,
I too am animating a 2D plant character like from Little Shop of Horrors. I’ve run into a snag and wondered if you guys had any thoughts.
My rig is such:
Plant Leaves and Flower Petals have been rigged using simple expressions on rotation and parented to a slider on a Null. These are around 6 layers in total
The stem of the plant I used the Puppet tool with an expression linking it to a Null like this:

n=thisComp.layer(“NullObject_Name”);
nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);
fromComp(nullpos);

The snag is that although the flower petal and leaves are parented to the Puppet Layer, they do not respond to position changes as you animate the puppet layer and of course it all falls apart. The leaves and Petals do not follow the stem.
SO,
I Pre-comped the whole thing and re-routed the expressions to the new comp and tried to Puppet that new layered Pre-comp. Ah that will not accept the puppet pins at all. So I guess I’m figuring out that you cannot Puppet Tool a Pre-Comp that contains multiple layers?
Big Bummer! Any thoughts are appreciated.

cheers,
Jack

cheers

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