Now that you understand Rigging, time to bring
in a character from adobe illustrator and get
it ready for action in the project bin. Right.
And I've just got magnus, and normally I would start a
new project if I wanted to bring in a new puppet,
but I do want to compare the new puppet to magnus.
So I'm actually going to keep this same project going.
So I'm going to go to file and import and
in the project files, I'm going to import rawsource AI.
So it's not a puppet file, it's an illustrator file.
So this is the raw sort of illustrator vector
graphics brought into character animator, and immediately it's turned
it into a puppet, but I don't see it.
So again, I'm going to drag it on down to the timeline.
And you can see I actually have two
puppets here, so I really don't want that.
So I'm going to go ahead and delete magnus.
That doesn't delete it from the
project, just from the timeline.
magnus is still with us.
Okay, now right now, Rob is doing nothing.
He's not moving because of two things.
Number one, I need to turn the camera on.
Number two, I need to arm Rob for recording.
So if I click on Rob, notice
that the little red dot comes on.
And now I'm getting some motion tracking. Okay?
So immediately, hopefully, you see that Rob is
sort of floating in space, and that's not
really what I'm looking to do.
So let's talk about locking him down and
why he floats and why magnus doesn't.
I'm going to get a magnus here, double click on
him, and that's going to bring up the rig panel.
And notice that magnus has a
head that's independent from its body.
That is, when I select head, I get a
big yellow circle around his sort of head, and
then the body is actually just the feet.
Now, if we compare this if we go back
to our project panel, we compare this to Rob.
Notice that when I click on rob's head,
everything is one big yellow selection around it.
Nothing is independent.
That is, the head has not
been made independent from the body.
Okay, now, this is actually probably a good thing.
And here's why.
If I go in here and I make the
head independent in this case, this is kind of
a personal preference thing, but notice that now his
head does rotate and his body does stay locked
down, but frankly, I think that looks weird.
So let's go ahead and undo that.
So I go to my history and undo that, and
let's actually just lock this part down and make him
move a little bit more naturally and organically.
To do that, I'm going to go back and double
click on Rob, which is going to launch Rigging here.
I could just click rig Two, though, and
instead of making his head sort of float
and his body sort of artificially stick.
What you can do is you can select at the top
level here, the Rob puppet, and use some of the great
rigging tools down here to lock or fix certain things down.
Now, you could use the pin tool, and that would pin
a bunch of little spots here and change the mesh.
Okay, so let's see what that see what that is?
If I show the mesh right now, you can see there's a
lot of tight mesh here and a lot of big space here.
And we actually kind of want the opposite.
We want all of this to get locked.
Now, if I use the pins, you can see that the
mesh gets tighter here, and that will lock it down.
But I might need a lot of these,
and it can get kind of busy looking.
So a better way to do it I'll hit Command Z
there a couple of times, is to use the stick tool.
And what's nice about the Stick tool
is that you can actually label the
stick as one big fixed modified object.
To do that, if I go over to modifiers here,
you can see I could say, hey, let's make that
fixed, and I'll get the little fixed tag.
Okay, so let's go back and test drive.
I go back to record and notice that he's
moving a lot better, and I'm getting a little
bit of that sort of nice little shoulder action.
Okay, now, a couple of other
little things I'd want to change.
Right now, I'm seeing some weirdness here, so I
need to move him down, and I'd really like
his head not to scale quite so much.
So another kind of classic thing you're going
to need to do is play with some
of the puppet behaviors over here.
So I'm going to go to Face, and you
can see there's a lot of options for Face.
The big one right now that I'm seeing
as I go back and forth is that
the head looks really weird and disproportional.
You can hit set, rest, pose, and the proportions
are going to be better, but I just don't
want it to ever sort of naturally scale.
So under the face behavior, you can see I've got
head scale strength, and if I crank it up or
down, it's going to much more dramatically affect the scaling.
I typically put this really low. Okay.
So I'm putting it at 3%.
All right.
The next thing I'd probably want to do
is move the whole character down, because he's
actually touching the top of the frame.
To do that, I need to just slide on down
in the properties panel, and you can see that you
can actually she just moved the puppet down.
All right, so Rob is now sort of ready to roll.
He's anchored down.
Yeah, he's got a much more natural look to him,
and he's in a good spot to start animating.