This is Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation.
And today I’m going to be showing you how to use the puppet pin tool in After Effects.
So this episode is a tutorial.
To use it, all you have to do is first get a still image that you want to animate.
Go ahead and get your PNG file with a transparent background and bring it into After Effects.
Drop your image into your new composition.
Go up to your toolbar and click on the tool that looks like a pin.
What you are going to do is set places where the joints are supposed to be.
This hand is a great example because I want to be able to animate each finger.
Go ahead and click on your image where the transformation points are going to be.
Once you have that set up, you’ll notice that you have this mesh and deform and all
of your pins are listed here.
You can keyframe the position of each one.
So there are two ways to animate with this tool: you can individually keyframe (which
the results look better), or you can click on the point… well, let me unselect all
of these… hold down the CTRL key and click on the point you want to animate.
You’ll see a timer show up.
And all you need to do now is drag it and After Effects will record your movement.
Once you are done, let go.
And you’ll see it’s in here in the composition.
It made all of the keyframes for me.
I’ll go ahead and play that back.
Now you can see there’s a little bit of an artifact here where the thumb didn’t
get registered in the mesh.
So the way to fix that is to go up to your puppet pin tool.
Go ahead and click on it.
And there's a box to show the mesh.
Zoom in here and you'll see that bit of artwork got left outside of the mesh.
What we need to do is come down to the options and expand the mesh a little bit.
Oh, that's too much.
Try to get it tight fitting but loose enough that none of your artwork is going to be left
out of the picture.
Play it back and you'll notice that artwork isn't messed up anymore.
Also note that when you are holding down CTRL and recording your motion, you can change
the speed at which you are recording.
All you need to do is click on your puppet pin tool and you will see Record Options up
here.
If you want to record at 100% of playback speed, turn it up to 100%.
Woah, not 1,000%.
You'd have to move really fast.
And you can adjust the smoothing and other things like that.
The other problem you might run into is maybe we want that index finger to go underneath
the finger left of it.
Well, that's what you need these other tools for.
There's the Overlap Tool and the Starch Tool.
Let's use the Overlap Tool first.
You'll see the mesh of your animated image here.
What you need to do is click on the part you want to be in front or in back.
Maybe about here.
Scroll down in your control panel and you'll see an overlap option now with all of your
overlap pins.
You can set what the percentage in front is.
Whichever part of your puppet has the higher percentage is the part that's going to be
in front.
And you can change it over time, so if later you need that index finger to be above again,
you could just change the percentage here to make sure it goes in the right place.
And you have the extent, so as I drag this up - actually, you can't quite see it on a
white background, so let me change this.
You'll notice by dragging up the extent, you are affecting more of the area within your
mesh.
If you need to reposition this you can drag it over here so you are not affecting the
entire hand, just the one finger.
Maybe we don't want it to be in front.
We'll set it negative.
If you need to, you can make more of these overlap pins.
As many as you need.
And change all the settings individually and keyframe them, whatever you need to do.
The last puppet related tool is the Starch Tool.
This is what you use to tell which parts of the image should be stiffer, like bones and
things like that.
We don't want the fingers to look like rubber, so we can set a starch point just like we
did with the overlap points on each individual finger.
You will see all of them down here, the Stiffness.
Same thing as the overlap tool, you can change the amount of stiffness you need it to have
and the extent.
Now the trick is to be careful with these starch points, because if you make parts too
stiff or extend them too far, you'll notice that the puppet starts to break.
Like here we kind of see the breaking with the overlap.
That's an overlap problem.
Let's figure out where that overlap point is by clicking our tool.
Extend that a bit more so the finger goes completely underneath.
So, as you can see a lot of this is just fiddling around with the points to make the animation
work the way you need it to.
Now, one thing to be aware of: you cannot do this on any Pre-Composition that has animation
changes in it.
Let me go over to these ants.
When you go inside the precomp, they have all of these separate legs that can be puppet
pin tooled.
Each leg is an individual PNG image and they are placed on top of the ant body.
Pretty simple.
But the problem is you were to go outside of that and say you have this ant fighting
the other ant and you want to the whole entire rig, well!
You can do that, but you are going to get these strange artifacts.
Let me show you.
Woop, the deform tool.
So let me show you what I am talking about.
Just kind of drag these around.
And if we play it back, see this leg, now it's broken.
That's what happens when you try to animate a precomposition that already has stuff inside
it happening.
What you can do is freeze frame the precomposition.
Maybe you made a puppet and it has all these pieces and it's in a certain pose that you
want to use.
Just freeze frame your precomp and that will solve a lot of the artifact problems.
So really important that you only apply this tool to still images.Of course if your precomp
doesn't have a lot of motion in it, you can kind of get away with animating the precomp,
but you're still going to get some of those artifacts that you will have to manually clean
up with masking or hand painting each frame.
The last great thing about this tool is you can make animations in 60 frames per second!
Play around with the settings.
The tool is really easy to use.
You'll have it figured out quickly.