[Dennis Fries]

All of the layers operate differently. Most are Null objects that I use as controllers for puppet pins, others are precomps, etc – all are parented to something or another so I don’t want to introduce an entirely new set of nulls for everything since it’s a pretty complex puppet already. Also, a lot of layers are additionally driven by sliders and angle controls that manipulate the puppet as a whole – allowing full body rotations and stuff like that.

But for example, an arm is a single image driven by three different null objects (shoulder, elbow, hand), each moving a different puppet pin inside the artwork. Ideally, I would like to be able to click a button that moves the null object back to it’s original position, and creates a keyframe there. That way if I move the nulls around and they get way too out of proportion, I can have a reset and everything looks normal again.

It’s for a character I’m going to spend a lot of time animating, so I’m trying to make the rig as intuitive as possible. Any ideas for a workaround or how to do this would be helpful.

I don’t know if it’s already too late to get something like this going – like if there was a better way to zero out all of the positions before I got going aside from shift+pickwhipping it to a null.

[Dennis Fries]

So another question for you now… I have a reset position checkbox expression that looks like this:

if (effect(“ResetPosition”)(“Checkbox”) == 1) {
[-105.9,446.5]
}else{
value
}

Which works great for referencing the original position when the checkbox is on, but it doesn’t really reset the value. Is there a different expression I could use to generate a keyframe at that original value which I can define? It doesn’t have to use a checkbox necessarily.

[Dennis Fries]

I didn’t think there was a way to do that, so the checkbox control is a good idea though thanks.

[Dennis Fries]

When in doubt, precomp!