[John Jennette]

Simple and elegant, Ted! That sounds like it would work perfectly – and much less messy than where my mind was thinking of. Thank you for the advice!

[John Jennette]

CRGreen has some free scripts that may help: Connect Vertex to Point and Connect Point to Mask Vertex. You can add as many links as you want.
https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/ie/

[John Jennette]

Due to the scripting that is involved, you can’t make any structural edits after rigging with DuIK. You can change colors, for example, but not anything that would affect the puppet mesh or bone structure.

I am a “keep-my-options-open” kind of animator myself, so planning everything ahead before jumping into AE is a challenge, but a necessary skill.

[John Jennette]

It sounds like you’re messing with the hue values. Since pink is just a lighter red, just use Change Color’s lightness transform to adjust the color, which wouldn’t involve other hues to cycle through.

To simplify, you can use the Fill effect instead of Color Change. That’s just a straight fade between two keyframed colors.

[John Jennette]

Thanks for your suggestion Erik, this is exactly what I was expecting to be able to do.

But character rigs are a lot more complicated than simple shapes… Duplicating just the arm wreaks havoc with the IK expressions and the animation, which means I’d have to duplicate the whole character and hide everything but the arm – not a problem, though it would make the project that much more complicated.

Also, I’m having issues applying a Stroke to anything other than an individual path or shape. The arm of my character is in two parts, plus the IK animation controllers. So it would have to be a precomp with a stroke applied. But the effect doesn’t work that way, and I can’t find something that could be applied to get the same effect.

[John Jennette]

Yeah, that’s what I think I will do. Luckily it is a very straightforward, four/five keyframe motion. Thanks for helping me try to puzzle it out!

I may still see if I can ask him how he keyframed, because I’ve never seen a graph like that before, and don’t know how (or why) you would create something like that. A little curiosity now can save time later – especially if it ends up in a more complex project…

[John Jennette]

Separate Dimensions is ghosted. I have researched that issue, but nothing seems to work.

It may be worth noting that the animation is on the anchor point of the object (which seems a bizarre way to animate something’s position, but it’s not my file). I should still be able to separate the dimensions though. Also, changing it to a bezier keyframe does not create handles, so even if I could separate, would there be anything to grab?

[John Jennette]

Thanks for the help! That’s my issue: there doesn’t seem to be anything TO grab. Those keyframes don’t have handles, even if they are set to bezier.

I could set the keys to linear, and add another keyframe slightly forward from center for the bounce back effect (which I still want to include). The problem then becomes when I try to ease, that sharp ‘V’ point is still there, throwing off the curve.

It’s a simple enough animation that I may just re-create it from scratch – I still don’t understand what caused the curve to make that ‘V’ shape in the first place…