Scene recording perfect in Ch, but limbs twisted after rendering.

[Dr. Franken Giggles]

I recorded a scene in Character Animator, it looked great, but when I sent it to adobe media encoder, my puppets limbs stretched up and one of his arms twisted.  If I don't see that in the recording, why does it do that after it renders? I did four different recordings with the same puppet and got the same result each time, I used a different puppet in a different scene and sent those 4 recordings to media encoder with it but those came out perfect. How can I prevent that from happening? I thought maybe it could be fixed in the rigging, but I can't see anything obvious. I am wanting to import them into Premier Pro cc which I have with no problem, but I don't want my puppet to look all twisted up and stretched when I have worked so hard to make the recordings to what I thought was good. I'm new to Ch so I'm hoping it's a simple thing I missed or overlooked.

[alank99101739]

Could you include a screen shot or video? Here are some different ideas in case useful:

• I had some scenes that started wrong but settled down - so I generated extra few seconds of video at start and trimmed it off. Would that work?
• Other times I found putting dragger on elbow helps when arms bend the wrong way. By dragging the wrist and elbow it stopped arms twisting backwards due to the elbow joint.
• I also had some problems when starting with arms pre-dragged to an initial position sometimes. I got some hands twisted. Again, short term workaround was to record hand in original position and drag it to desired position, then trim off start of clip.
• Someone else solved their problem by starting arms slightly bent in artwork - stopped things flipping the wrong way...

[Dr. Franken Giggles]

So here is a couple of screen shots one is how it looked when I recorded it in Ch. The other is after it was rendered in adobe media encoder. I noticed the background scene color changed too.

[alank99101739]

First, the easy one. The background color is changing most likely because its transparent (nothing there). In CH you can change the background color it will use on the screen, but media encoder does not use that setting - most encoders I think will replace transparency with black if you use an encoder without transparency support.  So drop a background in it and that should fix the background color issue (e.g. create a file with a big white rectangle.

The character’s left arm joint (the one you can see on the right) I notice gets a very thin joint when the arm goes up high. This is normally because the arms are not independent and default position of the arms is angled downwards, close to the body. In order to stretch it so far up, it gets thin like that. You can either have the default puppet artwork drawn with the arms out sideways (like the letter T) or move to making the arms independent so they pivot at the joints rather than stretch.

The character’s right arm with the elbow going crazy wrong direction is unfortunately common.  When the arm is straight in the original puppet and the dragger takes the hand to a position somewhat close to the body (that is, the arm is not fully stretched out), CH has to decide which way the elbow should go. The playback render algorithm (optimized for speed) and final record algorithm (optimized for quality) are not identical, so sometimes the elbow flips the wrong direction. If you always start with the arm fully extended, you will get less problems (not zero, just less). More recently I have added an extra dragger on the elbow, then at the start of the scene (and occasionally during it) I record a drag for the elbow just to make sure it starts in the correct position. After that it is generally fine - it is mainly at the start of a scene it gets it wrong - so a manual drag on the elbow for the first few frames is enough to give it a hint to get it right. Another approach is to design the artwork to have a bend in the arm which also seems to help it guess the right way to flip the elbow more often.

[Dr. Franken Giggles]

Thanks alank99101733 I did all those things and it fixed all the problems