Pupils correct set up help needed

[IanD101]

Hi,

I have successfully made many characters of my own from many templates offered here on Adobe. Today I began building everything from Scratch but I'm having trouble figuring out how to label the layers correctly.

As you'll see in my image, the templates have one layer underlined & the other with a downward arrow. They seem to help control everything.

Can anyone show me how to do this or show me another way to bundle the eyes together.

Many thanks,

Ian

[alank99101739]

The downward arrow can be turned on using the menu item “Create Clipping Mask”. It causes the pupil to be clipped by the eyeball layer.

If you are asking about eyes specifically, I did a write up on how I debug eye problems that might be more than you need, but might contain some useful information on layer names and how it works. It also mentions clipping. https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/

I notice the puppet has “Right Eye” with a nested layer of “Right Eye”. That can cause problems as the auto-tagging rules may tag both with the “Right Eye” tag, getting Ch confused.

[IanD101]

Thanks so much for letting me share your post. Its very well written and explains things in great detail.

I managed to tweak all of my characters with this information except my new one that I built from scratch. The eyes don't seem to respond to anything.

Would you mind taking a look at my puppet? Is it best to share it on this thread or is there a better way?

Many thanks,

Ian

[alank99101739]

I sent you a direct message through the forum Message service.

[alank99101739]

Wow! IanD shared me a copy of the puppet. Its Photoshop based (not my specialty!). I think the problem is stray pixels on multiple layers. I asked Ian to try and clean them up first, but has anyone else seen this sort of wacky eye movements? I mean the Left Eye moves in the wrong direction!!! I have never seen anything quite like it! Eyes debugging session - YouTube   Even scaling the body distorts it in very strange ways. 

Ah, turning on Contour and cleaning up the layers a bit means scaling now looks normal. Just the eye movements. My guess is the "Pupil Range" and "Pupil" layers being discontinuous (having stray pixels) are making the eyeball jump around as it tries to do the right thing.

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

Examples of the stray pixels... (the one on the right I cleaned up a bit... but was taking too long). Scaling the puppet worked properly after a bit of clean up.

Stray pixels are in lots of layers - e.g. I put a solid fill behind the two pupils...

Also stray in the eyeballs. I think the stray pixels where the eyes are constrained by the eye balls are the reason its going a bit crazy.

These stray pixels is why the blue bounding box is so big, causing various problems. See the yellow line has tried to follow the main shape outline, but the blue box is a lot bigger due to all the stray pixels.

[alank99101739]

Ian sent me a cleaned up version, but still was not clean enough, so I recorded going through and cleaning up further. 20 minutes! Not a particularly interesting video, but sharing in case useful to anyone. Photoshop "boss" puppet debugging session - YouTube   (Might take another hour to finish "processing" before you can play it all on YouTube).

D’oh! It was a 20 minute recording, but YouTube is showing me 9 minutes on playback - so half got lost somehow? Maybe it will all come back when processing has finished. Sigh!