Animating With Puppet Tools - Adobe 12040118 - After Effects Standard Tutorial

Animating with Puppet tools

Puppet tools overview and resources
Manually animate an image with the Puppet tools
Record animation by sketching motion with the Puppet Pin tool
How the Puppet effect creates outlines
Work with Puppet pins and the distortion mesh
Puppet Overlap controls
Puppet Starch controls
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Puppet tools overview and resources
Use the Puppet tools to quickly add natural motion to raster images and vector graphics, including still images, shapes, and text characters.
Note: Though the Puppet tools work within an effect (the Puppet effect), you don't apply the effect using the Effect menu or the Effects & Presets
panel. Use the Puppet tools in the Tools panel to directly apply and work with the effect in the Layer panel or Composition panel.
The Puppet effect works by deforming part of an image according to the positions of pins that you place and move. These pins define what parts
of the image should move, what parts should remain rigid, and what parts should be in front when parts overlap.
Each Puppet tool is used to place and modify a specific type of pin:
Puppet Pin tool Use this tool to place and move Deform pins.
Puppet Overlap tool Use this tool to place Overlap pins, which indicate which parts of an image should appear in front of others when
distortion causes parts of the image to overlap one another.
Puppet Starch tool Use this tool to place Starch pins, which stiffen parts of the image so that they are distorted less.
Mesh created by placing Deform pins (left), and result of dragging a Deform pin
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.) Each part
of the mesh is also associated with the pixels of the image, so the 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 is large, but the motion in the waist is 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.)
You can have multiple meshes on one layer. Having multiple meshes on one layer 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: Don't animate the position or scale of a continuously rasterized layer with layer transformations if you are also animating the layer with the
Puppet tools. The render order for continuously rasterized layers—such as shape layers and text layers—is different from the render order for
raster layers. 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 and Continuously rasterize a layer containing vector
graphics.)
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 Motion blur.)