Study Task 3: Puppet Master

Pointers from the task summary:

• Puppet Pin - places controls on your asset.
• Puppet Overlap - selected areas are appear at the front of the composition.
• Puppet Starch - selected areas will not distort as much.

After I placed the pins, I tried to mess around with my puppet-self and this happened.

Stretching out in the morning be like...

I put some of the puppet starch on the puppet, but I guess the wonky aesthetic of the puppet tool is inevitable. Initially, I tried to do a running cycle with my puppet, but it is so difficult as the tool distorts the character, and there is no way to put the character back into its initial position unless I am willing to invest more time and get serious on this.

After several tryouts I decided to give up on making my puppet running while trying to get to the other side of the road.

Puppet Starch

Unlike the puppet starch tool, that is hardly useful and sometimes can ruin the form of the puppet, the puppet overlap tool is the real life-saver!

To make it work, simply put pins down on the corners of the mesh while turning on the Mesh visibility. Once pinned, white area will show depending on where the pin is placed, and that is the surface that will be at the front, so when animating a a movement that overlap with other parts of the puppets, the part that is covered in white will be on top of everything else. 

Puppet Overlap

Also, more pins placed, the greater the density of the white area. The whitest the area is the part that will appear on top of everything else in the puppet layer. This is helpful when you are working with puppet that is facing sideways. As you can see from the image below, the pins on the right arm is more dense than those in the body, so when there is an overlapping movement, it will appear on top of the body.

Puppet Overlap

 The final product is nothing to be proud of, but I had a good laugh making this puppet tool animation. I tried to create something similar to the aesthetic of cyriak's animation, who is one of the practitioners who uses puppet tool for his animation. Puppet tool is a fundamental feature of After Effects, pretty straightforward, yet important because it is also the basic of creating a more complicated rig using the DUIK plug in.

Final Piece: (to be replaced when I've put in the audio)

Cyriak's cows & cows & cows: