Rob Logan
Forum Replies Created
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I haven’t seen the broken rig problem you’re describing but in my experience time-remapping puppet pin animations is a bad idea–there are so many keyframes and expressions that are time-related that it can result in jerky looking animation and other weirdness. I’m not an expert in DUIK but that’s been my experience.
I know it’s tempting when you see your animation is moving too slow or too fast to just precomp all the layers and then start time remapping until you get the speed you need but it often causes more problems than it solves, especially later on if you have to do revisions. It’s better to get all your keyframes in the original comp to time correctly. The best way to do it is to highlight all the keyframes you want to move stretch or shrink. Then grab the first or last keyframe, hold the alt key and drag. This will stretch them all (or shrink them), maintaining the same proportional distance between each keyframe. Just do this until you get the right speed for your animation.
If you must do time remapping with a DUIK comp, it’s best to export a lossless AVI of your comp and then import the video back into After Effects and do the time remapping on the video file. Although not an ideal solution, if you’re pressed for time, it may help you get the job done quickly and avoid all the quirky weirdness that happens when retiming a puppet pin animation.
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What do mean when you say the “the rig falls apart” when you time stretch?
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Tom,
You probably need to use the Puppet Starch tool. Starch is essential in avoiding the ‘rubber hose’ look.
You may also need to change the IK Orientation setting for each controller connected to an arm or leg. It determines which way the knee or elbow bends.
Lastly, do you have the toe pin parented correctly to the ankle?
Rob
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I too have run into occasional bugs with this script. I love DUIK but even with Auto-rig it can be a handful to use. I just got finished rigging a fairly complicated model only to find that none of the controller parameters can be changed and every limb is stuck in auto-stretch mode.
I’m thinking it might be a bug in the boning process. Animator Daniel Geis has talked about how he bones only one pin at a time in an effort to avoid DUIK problems. I was more ambitious and tried to bone multiple puppet pins at once… which may have caused the problem.
Do you know of a quick method to easily de-rig everything and start over? Even deleting the bones and controllers still leaves a bunch of expressions connected to each puppet pin.
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I’ve experienced this bug too. It’s happened only when I have effects on either clip. I have to remove all effects from the clips in question, then I can copy and paste keyframes between clips without problem.
I’m using CS6 but the problem appears to be an old one. I saw a post on Creative Cow from 2003 complaining about the same issue.
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I have the same problem. Speedgrade CS6 can’t open XDCAM EX media. I have footage from a Sony EX3. Premiere CS6 deals with it just fine but when I export an EDL for Speedgrade, I haven’t been able to reconnect the footage.
I navigate to the BPAV folders in the Speedgrade desktop. It shows the files, but is unable to open them.
Short of upgrading to Speedgrade CC, does anyone have a workaround?
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An approach I’ve heard about is to save out the files as raster-based images, jpgs, pngs, or psds. Group them by body part, heads in one folder, arms in another, and so forth. Bring into AE by importing as footage rather than separate files or comps. The advantage is supposed to be that you can quickly replace body parts by using time remapping. So, for example if you wanted to animate a mouth talking, you import all the mouth shapes into a single footage file and swap mouths by just scrubbing the time remap value and setting a hold keyframe on the mouth shape you need. This cleans up your timeline and makes the need for multiple parts unnecessary.