WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.130 --> 00:00:03.080 This is Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation. 00:00:03.080 --> 00:00:07.310 And today I’m going to be showing you how to use the puppet pin tool in After Effects. 00:00:07.310 --> 00:00:09.270 So this episode is a tutorial. 00:00:09.270 --> 00:00:13.889 To use it, all you have to do is first get a still image that you want to animate. 00:00:13.889 --> 00:00:19.400 Go ahead and get your PNG file with a transparent background and bring it into After Effects. 00:00:19.400 --> 00:00:21.220 Drop your image into your new composition. 00:00:21.220 --> 00:00:25.279 Go up to your toolbar and click on the tool that looks like a pin. 00:00:25.279 --> 00:00:30.909 What you are going to do is set places where the joints are supposed to be. 00:00:30.909 --> 00:00:35.770 This hand is a great example because I want to be able to animate each finger. 00:00:35.770 --> 00:00:42.370 Go ahead and click on your image where the transformation points are going to be. 00:00:42.370 --> 00:00:48.460 Once you have that set up, you’ll notice that you have this mesh and deform and all 00:00:48.460 --> 00:00:50.580 of your pins are listed here. 00:00:50.580 --> 00:00:52.780 You can keyframe the position of each one. 00:00:52.780 --> 00:00:56.800 So there are two ways to animate with this tool: you can individually keyframe (which 00:00:56.800 --> 00:01:02.470 the results look better), or you can click on the point… well, let me unselect all 00:01:02.470 --> 00:01:06.329 of these… hold down the CTRL key and click on the point you want to animate. 00:01:06.329 --> 00:01:08.470 You’ll see a timer show up. 00:01:08.470 --> 00:01:15.069 And all you need to do now is drag it and After Effects will record your movement. 00:01:15.069 --> 00:01:18.509 Once you are done, let go. 00:01:18.509 --> 00:01:20.799 And you’ll see it’s in here in the composition. 00:01:20.799 --> 00:01:22.799 It made all of the keyframes for me. 00:01:22.799 --> 00:01:28.490 I’ll go ahead and play that back. 00:01:28.490 --> 00:01:32.600 Now you can see there’s a little bit of an artifact here where the thumb didn’t 00:01:32.600 --> 00:01:34.680 get registered in the mesh. 00:01:34.680 --> 00:01:38.020 So the way to fix that is to go up to your puppet pin tool. 00:01:38.020 --> 00:01:39.539 Go ahead and click on it. 00:01:39.539 --> 00:01:42.200 And there's a box to show the mesh. 00:01:42.200 --> 00:01:46.109 Zoom in here and you'll see that bit of artwork got left outside of the mesh. 00:01:46.109 --> 00:01:51.420 What we need to do is come down to the options and expand the mesh a little bit. 00:01:51.420 --> 00:01:52.429 Oh, that's too much. 00:01:52.429 --> 00:01:57.799 Try to get it tight fitting but loose enough that none of your artwork is going to be left 00:01:57.799 --> 00:01:59.329 out of the picture. 00:01:59.329 --> 00:02:04.409 Play it back and you'll notice that artwork isn't messed up anymore. 00:02:04.409 --> 00:02:08.509 Also note that when you are holding down CTRL and recording your motion, you can change 00:02:08.509 --> 00:02:10.880 the speed at which you are recording. 00:02:10.880 --> 00:02:15.650 All you need to do is click on your puppet pin tool and you will see Record Options up 00:02:15.650 --> 00:02:16.650 here. 00:02:16.650 --> 00:02:20.920 If you want to record at 100% of playback speed, turn it up to 100%. 00:02:20.920 --> 00:02:21.970 Woah, not 1,000%. 00:02:21.970 --> 00:02:24.310 You'd have to move really fast. 00:02:24.310 --> 00:02:27.000 And you can adjust the smoothing and other things like that. 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:32.680 The other problem you might run into is maybe we want that index finger to go underneath 00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:34.420 the finger left of it. 00:02:34.420 --> 00:02:37.950 Well, that's what you need these other tools for. 00:02:37.950 --> 00:02:40.200 There's the Overlap Tool and the Starch Tool. 00:02:40.200 --> 00:02:43.030 Let's use the Overlap Tool first. 00:02:43.030 --> 00:02:46.920 You'll see the mesh of your animated image here. 00:02:46.920 --> 00:02:51.430 What you need to do is click on the part you want to be in front or in back. 00:02:51.430 --> 00:02:52.930 Maybe about here. 00:02:52.930 --> 00:02:57.570 Scroll down in your control panel and you'll see an overlap option now with all of your 00:02:57.570 --> 00:02:59.520 overlap pins. 00:02:59.520 --> 00:03:02.870 You can set what the percentage in front is. 00:03:02.870 --> 00:03:06.460 Whichever part of your puppet has the higher percentage is the part that's going to be 00:03:06.460 --> 00:03:07.520 in front. 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:12.040 And you can change it over time, so if later you need that index finger to be above again, 00:03:12.040 --> 00:03:16.040 you could just change the percentage here to make sure it goes in the right place. 00:03:16.040 --> 00:03:20.530 And you have the extent, so as I drag this up - actually, you can't quite see it on a 00:03:20.530 --> 00:03:22.820 white background, so let me change this. 00:03:22.820 --> 00:03:28.130 You'll notice by dragging up the extent, you are affecting more of the area within your 00:03:28.130 --> 00:03:29.850 mesh. 00:03:29.850 --> 00:03:33.630 If you need to reposition this you can drag it over here so you are not affecting the 00:03:33.630 --> 00:03:36.730 entire hand, just the one finger. 00:03:36.730 --> 00:03:38.510 Maybe we don't want it to be in front. 00:03:38.510 --> 00:03:40.380 We'll set it negative. 00:03:40.380 --> 00:03:43.200 If you need to, you can make more of these overlap pins. 00:03:43.200 --> 00:03:44.840 As many as you need. 00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:48.870 And change all the settings individually and keyframe them, whatever you need to do. 00:03:48.870 --> 00:03:52.870 The last puppet related tool is the Starch Tool. 00:03:52.870 --> 00:03:58.000 This is what you use to tell which parts of the image should be stiffer, like bones and 00:03:58.000 --> 00:03:59.070 things like that. 00:03:59.070 --> 00:04:03.420 We don't want the fingers to look like rubber, so we can set a starch point just like we 00:04:03.420 --> 00:04:07.630 did with the overlap points on each individual finger. 00:04:07.630 --> 00:04:14.040 You will see all of them down here, the Stiffness. 00:04:14.040 --> 00:04:19.280 Same thing as the overlap tool, you can change the amount of stiffness you need it to have 00:04:19.280 --> 00:04:21.090 and the extent. 00:04:21.090 --> 00:04:24.700 Now the trick is to be careful with these starch points, because if you make parts too 00:04:24.700 --> 00:04:29.380 stiff or extend them too far, you'll notice that the puppet starts to break. 00:04:29.380 --> 00:04:32.100 Like here we kind of see the breaking with the overlap. 00:04:32.100 --> 00:04:34.040 That's an overlap problem. 00:04:34.040 --> 00:04:38.910 Let's figure out where that overlap point is by clicking our tool. 00:04:38.910 --> 00:04:41.190 Extend that a bit more so the finger goes completely underneath. 00:04:41.190 --> 00:04:45.600 So, as you can see a lot of this is just fiddling around with the points to make the animation 00:04:45.600 --> 00:04:47.050 work the way you need it to. 00:04:47.050 --> 00:04:53.500 Now, one thing to be aware of: you cannot do this on any Pre-Composition that has animation 00:04:53.500 --> 00:04:54.910 changes in it. 00:04:54.910 --> 00:04:56.980 Let me go over to these ants. 00:04:56.980 --> 00:05:01.720 When you go inside the precomp, they have all of these separate legs that can be puppet 00:05:01.720 --> 00:05:02.720 pin tooled. 00:05:02.720 --> 00:05:07.850 Each leg is an individual PNG image and they are placed on top of the ant body. 00:05:07.850 --> 00:05:08.850 Pretty simple. 00:05:08.850 --> 00:05:14.430 But the problem is you were to go outside of that and say you have this ant fighting 00:05:14.430 --> 00:05:18.889 the other ant and you want to the whole entire rig, well! 00:05:18.889 --> 00:05:22.400 You can do that, but you are going to get these strange artifacts. 00:05:22.400 --> 00:05:24.220 Let me show you. 00:05:24.220 --> 00:05:27.610 Woop, the deform tool. 00:05:27.610 --> 00:05:31.260 So let me show you what I am talking about. 00:05:31.260 --> 00:05:33.300 Just kind of drag these around. 00:05:33.300 --> 00:05:43.480 And if we play it back, see this leg, now it's broken. 00:05:43.480 --> 00:05:48.620 That's what happens when you try to animate a precomposition that already has stuff inside 00:05:48.620 --> 00:05:49.620 it happening. 00:05:49.620 --> 00:05:53.020 What you can do is freeze frame the precomposition. 00:05:53.020 --> 00:05:56.310 Maybe you made a puppet and it has all these pieces and it's in a certain pose that you 00:05:56.310 --> 00:05:57.850 want to use. 00:05:57.850 --> 00:06:04.310 Just freeze frame your precomp and that will solve a lot of the artifact problems. 00:06:04.310 --> 00:06:09.300 So really important that you only apply this tool to still images.Of course if your precomp 00:06:09.300 --> 00:06:14.150 doesn't have a lot of motion in it, you can kind of get away with animating the precomp, 00:06:14.150 --> 00:06:17.889 but you're still going to get some of those artifacts that you will have to manually clean 00:06:17.889 --> 00:06:21.330 up with masking or hand painting each frame. 00:06:21.330 --> 00:06:27.750 The last great thing about this tool is you can make animations in 60 frames per second! 00:06:27.750 --> 00:06:28.810 Play around with the settings. 00:06:28.810 --> 00:06:30.360 The tool is really easy to use. 00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:31.750 You'll have it figured out quickly.