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what exactly is the puppeteer tab for with animate2?

ToobisToobis Posts: 990
edited September 2016 in The Commons

I am just trying to find out what it is used for exactly with animate 2. Is it for creating your own aniblocks or?

Try and keep it simple please.

Post edited by Toobis on

Comments

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    With puppeteer, you can put several poses in the grid, move between the poses so that they make an animation.  As the cursor moves from one pose to another it tries to extrapolate between the two poses to give a smooth, consistent movement between them which is nice for animations moving from one stance to another.  When you have it set up the way you want, record your movements and then it can go into the keyframes and be turned into an aniblock.

    SnowSultan had a good video on Puppeteer:

    And, DAZ Studio has a good video on their YouTube Channel:

    This one is older, but hilarious:

  • ToobisToobis Posts: 990

    Awesome thanks! do you know if you can move 2 figures at once with this?

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    Toobis said:

    Awesome thanks! do you know if you can move 2 figures at once with this?

    That, I haven't tried, but my initial response would be probably not.  Puppeteer is geared toward moving on figure at a time.  You could have two figures, one on each layer, where you want them and do two separate animations and then possibly sinc them up, but I'm not sure you could do them together. Having them on the two layers would just be for reference as to how they might be interacting with each other for each pose.  The animations themselves would, I think, have to be done separately and then sinced up again in the timeline like you would with other aniblocks.  Again, it isn't something I've tried, yet, so no idea how that would work.

  • mindsongmindsong Posts: 1,724
    edited September 2016

    Something of note (and I think the animate/powerpose/puppeteer suite is the cat's meow), the videos all 'sell' the idea that you simply set some poses in puppeteer, 'perform' the actions while recording and save as an aniblock, and life is good...

    Not-so-simple in real life. Be aware that you can certainly do just that sequence to useable effect, but if the poses you chose aren't 'pure' and happen-to-have face/expression settings set, even though the pose doesn't seem to need them, the resulting 'recordings' and your home-made aniblocks can pollute the character faces/expressions in your work later on.

    It's not a hard fix, but someone using this workflow should be sure to 'clean out' the various translations, morphs, and other side-effects that the puppeteering may quietly inject into a timeline, before saving the recording(s) to an aniblock. I recommend using the keymate add-on product and the built-in animate2 graph editor to fine-tune the aniblock creation process, keeping the key-frame tracks as isolated (e.g. for a leg action aniblock, clean out *all* the non-leg-related keys before saving the new aniblock) as possible for the best long-term results.

    Again, I like and use the toolchain to good effect, but there's more-than-meets-the-eye when it comes to get the intended results from these tools than the marketting videos would seem to indicate. Which is usually the case in all of these powerful features.

    cheers,

    --ms

    Post edited by mindsong on
  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    I tend to think that having the expressions totally separate from all of the rest of the action would be a wise choice.  The little I've played with it, it seems wise to be able to change and modify the expressions if they are a completely separate layer to the other moving parts.  The same way you would have any breathing movements separate.  Just my initial observations.  I haven't gotten very far in the animation process yet and I still have tons to learn.

  • mindsongmindsong Posts: 1,724

    Exactly - start ot with this approach (isolate your character 'sections' in various puppeteer tabs), and the tool can do wonders!

    Also, looking at the puppeteer interface when you've got that tab open, you have to pick one character from the upper pull-down menu to enable that character's active puppeteer tabs. This says to me that you cannot actually have more than one character being driven at a time with the tool as designed. It does mean that you can have a bunch of characters in a scene, and after selecting each, you can apply any number of puppeteer 'setups' to that character, and then easily switch between those characters and their tabs, so there's still a viable method of having multiple characters 'interact' and be tweakable with the puppeteer tool as the driver, but that would be a frame-by-frame sort of thing, rather than the 'session recording' mode that kicks-butt for the more dynamic 'performance animation' uses.

    Neat stuff.

    --ms

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