Puppet overlap tool

Whether an element appears in front or behind your puppet is totally random unless you tell After Effects specifically which parts should be in front and which parts should be behind.

For this, you use the Puppet Overlap Tool. Just like the other puppet tools, the puppet overlap tool comes with its own little toolbar. It looks and works almost identical to the puppet starch tool.

Once you have the overlap tool selected, you can click on your puppet to add a new Overlap Point. Each overlap point has an Extent and an In Front value. The extent works exactly like it does for the starch tool and defines the reach of the overlap area. The In Front value defines the depth for the area. Dave Scotland provides a video tutorial on the CG Swot website that demonstrates how to create a looping character animation using the Puppet tools. Daniel Gies provides a detailed series of video tutorials in which he demonstrates the use of inverse kinematics and the Puppet tools to rig and animate a character.

The stopwatch switch is automatically set for the Position property of a Deform pin as soon as the pin is created. Therefore, a keyframe is set or modified each time that you change the position of a Deform pin. This auto-keyframing is unlike most properties in After Effects, for which you must explicitly set the stopwatch switch by adding a keyframe or an expression to animate each property. The auto-animation of Deform pins makes it convenient to add them and animate them in the Composition panel or Layer panel, without manipulating the properties in the Timeline panel.

Click any nontransparent pixel of a raster layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline created by auto-tracing the alpha channel of a layer. Click within a closed path on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by that path. Click within a closed, unlocked mask to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by the mask path.

Click outside all closed paths on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect without creating a mesh. Outlines are created for paths on the layer, though an outline is only visible when a Puppet tool pointer is over the area that the outline defines.

Place the pointer over the area enclosed by a path to see the outline in which a mesh will be created if you click that point. Click within an outline to create a mesh. Increase the Triangle value in the Tools panel and try again. Use as few pins as possible to achieve your desired result. The natural deformation provided by the Puppet effect can be lost if you over-constrain the image. Just add pins to the parts of the figure that you know that you want to control. For example, when animating a person waving, add a pin to each foot to hold them to the ground, and add a pin to the waving hand.

You can modify the motion paths of the Deform pins using the same techniques that you use to modify any other motion paths. After Effects no longer draws the tinted fill for the original layer region when hovering using the Puppet Pin tool.

You can sketch the motion path of one or more Deform pins in real time—or at a speed that you specify—much as you can sketch the motion path of a layer using Motion Sketch. Before you begin recording motion, you may want to configure settings for recording. The ratio of the speed of the recorded motion to speed of playback.

Creating fewer keyframes makes motion smoother. Use Draft Deformation. The distorted outline that is shown during recording does not take Starch pins into account. This option can improve performance for a complex mesh. This procedure assumes that you have already placed Deform pins in the object to animate. For information on placing Deform pins, see Manually animate an image with the Puppet tools.

Recording of motion begins when you click to begin the drag. Recording ends when you release the mouse button. The color of the outline for the mesh for which motion is being sketched is the same as the color of the pin yellow.

Reference outlines, for other meshes on the same layer, match the label color of the layer. The current-time indicator returns to the time at which recording began, so that you can repeat the recording operation with more Deform pins or redo the recording operation with the same pins. The motion path for a pin is shown only if it is the only pin selected.

Try creating several duplicate meshes and sketching motion for each mesh. When you have multiple meshes in the same instance of the Puppet effect, you can sketch motion for one mesh while seeing the reference outlines of the others, allowing you to follow their movements, either roughly or precisely. When a Puppet mesh is created, its boundaries are determined by an outline, which can be defined by any of the following types of closed paths:.

If a layer has no unlocked masks, shapes, or text characters on it when you apply the Puppet effect, it uses Auto-trace to create paths from the alpha channel. These paths are only used by the Puppet effect in the determination of outlines and do not appear as masks on the layer. If the layer is a raster layer with no alpha channel, the result is a single rectangular path around the bounds of the layer.

For a complex image, or to configure Auto-trace settings, use Auto-trace before using the Puppet tools. See Create a mask from channel values with Auto-trace. A text character that consists of multiple disjoint closed paths such as the letter i is treated as multiple separate paths. The stroke of a shape or text character is not used in the determination of outlines; only the path is used.

To encompass a stroke within a mesh created from such items, increase the Expansion value. The default value of 3 pixels for Expansion encompasses a stroke that extends 3 pixels or less from its path. Apply paint strokes to a layer using the Brush tool with the Paint On Transparent option. Painting with this option selected creates a raster layer with only the paint strokes, defined by an alpha channel.

You can then use the Puppet tools to animate the paint strokes. Do not use a mask on the layer. If multiple masks, shapes, or characters overlap on the same layer, an outline is created from the union of the overlapping shapes, overlapping characters, or overlapping masks. If a mask overlaps a text character or shape, outlines are created for the entire character or shape, for the portion of the character or shape that is inside the mask, and for the mask itself.

To distort multiple disjoint characters or shapes as one object, surround the individual objects with a mask with mask mode set to None , and use the mask path as the outline with which to create the mesh. You can delete the mask after you have created the mesh.

If the Puppet effect has already been applied to a layer, outlines appear with a yellow highlight as you move a Puppet tool pointer over them. You can choose the outline in which to place an initial pin to create a mesh. A mesh is created each time that you click within an outline with a Puppet tool. If the Puppet effect has not already been applied to a layer, outlines for that layer have not yet been calculated.

When you click, the Puppet effect calculates outlines and determines whether you have clicked within an outline. If so, it creates a mesh defined by the outline in which you clicked. Otherwise, you can move the pointer around in the layer to select the outline in which to place a pin and create a mesh. Moving the pointer around in the layer is useful for seeing the outlines of various objects and choosing which outlines to use to create a mesh. Sometimes, you want to animate an image from an initial position, through an intermediate position, and back to the initial position.

Rather than manually dragging the pins back to their initial positions at the end of the animation, place the current-time indicator at the end time and click Reset. Only the keyframes at the current time are reset. A higher number of triangles gives smoother results but takes longer to render. Small objects, like text characters, usually distort well with only 50 triangles, whereas a large figure may require The number of triangles used may not match the Triangle value exactly; this value is a target only.

When you are distorting one part of an image, you may want to control which parts of the image appear in front of other parts. For example, you may want to keep an arm in front of the face as you make the arm wave. Use the Puppet Overlap tool to apply Overlap pins to the parts of an object for which you want to control apparent depth.

The apparent proximity to the viewer. The influence of Overlap pins is cumulative, meaning that the In Front values are added together for places on the mesh where extents overlap. You can use negative In Front values to cancel out the influence of another Overlap pin at a specific location.

An area of the mesh that is not influenced by Overlap pins has an implicit In Front value of 0. The default value for a new Overlap pin is Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. The Puppet tools in After Effects let you quickly add natural motion to raster images and vector graphics. Three tools create "pins" to define the point of deformation, areas of overlap, and areas that should remain more rigid. An additional tool, Puppet Sketch, lets you record animation in real time.

In this exercise, you'll use the Puppet tools to animate a character slipping on a banana peel. Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Next, you'll add the banana peel. At its default size, it's large enough to do real damage to anyone who slips on it.

You'll scale it to a more proportional size for the scene. Figure 4. Figure 5. The last element in the scene is the character himself. You'll add him to the composition and then scale and position him appropriately.

In the original drawing, the character had already slipped on the banana peel and was falling. To make it easier to animate, the character has been modified to be more upright. It may not always be necessary or possible to modify the element you want to animate, but sometimes you can make your work easier by making some adjustments before animation. Figure 6. I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from Adobe Press and its family of brands.

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