Adobe AFTER EFFECTS CS3 PROFESSIONAL User Manual page 234

When you place the first pin, the area within an outline is automatically divided into a mesh of triangles. An outline
is only visible when the Puppet effect has been applied and a Puppet tool pointer is over the area that the outline
defines. (See "How the Puppet effect creates outlines" on page 230.) Each part of the mesh is also associated with the
pixels of the image, so the image's pixels move with the mesh.
Note: To show the mesh, select Show in the Tools panel.
When you move one or more Deform pins, the mesh changes shape to accommodate this movement, while keeping
the overall mesh as rigid as possible. The result is that a movement in one part of the image causes natural, life-like
movement in other parts of the image.
For example, if you place Deform pins in a person's feet and hands and then move one of the hands to make it wave,
the motion in the attached arm will be large, but the motion in the waist will be small, just as in the real world.
If a single animated Deform pin is selected, its Position keyframes are visible in the Composition panel and Layer
panel as a motion path. You can work with these motion paths as you work with other motion paths, including
setting keyframes to rove across time. (See "Smooth motion with roving keyframes" on page 217.)
You can have multiple meshes on one layer. This is useful for deforming several parts of an image individually—such
as text characters—as well as for deforming multiple instances of the same part of an image, each with a different
deformation.
The original, undistorted mesh is calculated at the current frame at the time at which you apply the effect. The mesh
does not change to accommodate motion in a layer based on motion footage, nor does the mesh update if you replace
a layer's source footage item.
Note: Because the render order for continuously rasterized layers—such as shape layers and text layers—is different than
the render order for raster layers, you should not animate the position or scale of a continuously rasterized layer with
layer transformations if you are also animating the layer with the Puppet tools. You can precompose the shape layer and
use the Puppet tools on the precomposition layer, or you can use the Puppet tools to transform the shapes within the layer.
(See "Render order and collapsing transformations" on page 119 and "Continuously rasterize a layer containing vector
graphics" on page 154.)
The motion created by the Puppet tools is sampled by motion blur if motion blur is enabled for the layer and the
composition, though the number of samples used is half of the value specified by the Samples Per Frame value. (See
"Use motion blur" on page 202.)
You can use expressions to link the positions of Deform pins to motion tracking data, audio amplitude keyframes, or
any other properties.
See also
"Creating and modifying motion paths" on page 199
"Expressions" on page 543
Manually animate an image with the Puppet tools
The stopwatch switch is automatically set for the Position property of a Deform pin as soon as the pin is created.
This means that a keyframe is set or modified each time that you change the position of a Deform pin. This 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.
Select the layer that contains the image to animate.
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