3D puppet pin and other small questions

[stefanov693548]

Hello guys,

is it possibile to use the puppet pin feature in a 3D environment?

I'm asking this because I'm creating a video where a couple of characters are climbing a stairway and the camera is frontal. So basically you see these 2 characters climbing it from a frontal view.

It's basically impossible to make a semi-realistic animation from the frontal 2D view because it's really hard to animate legs and arms that ideally are going in the Z direction.

So if I use a camera and I move it so I can see the side of the stairway, even if the characters are 2D, can I use the puppet pin and move the pins in Z line?

I need this for the reason I wrote above and because the climbing should be difficult to do so I would like to give the characters an hunchback pose.

Characters are simple silhouette, so there won't be shading or clipping problems I guess?

Also, for a semi-realistic short movie about a commercial product, what kind of shape should I use for these characters in your opinion? I've done a bunch of sketches, some of them are very geometrical, others are made by curve shapes. I really can't think about a perfect shape for these characters, I've seen some short movies and I've tried to make them similar, but I feel like I'm not watching the right movies. If you guys have some example about some silhouettes of semi-realistic characters I would be very glad to see them and take some inspiration!

Cheers,

- Ste

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Puppet pin is 2D only and you cannot have any other transformation animations on that layer. If you need to move or animate your puppet pin layer after you have animated the puppet you must pre-compose and then apply your scale, position and rotation movements. Puppet pin is great at what it does but it is very limited so don't expect miracles like animation in 3D space any time soon.

As for the shape of your cartoon, that all depends on what kind of an artist you are and the audience you are trying to reach. You didn't give me much to go on. I've used everything from stick figures to photo-realistic images. Another big factor in the choice of the look is the budget. Stick figures = a few bucks a second of screen time, photo-realistic = maybe a couple hundred dollars a second of screen time or more. You could easily jack the price up to several thousand dollars per finished second. If you are not considering budget then you are not going to stay in business very long.

[stefanov693548]

Thanks for your answer.

I'm actually an employee so the budged isn't really my decision.

It took about 20 minutes to do about 6 different shapes for the charactes and as I said, they don't need to be very detailed since they are black silhouettes, I was just looking for the best balance between a cartoon-ish character and a realistic character and maybe some examples.

For the puppet pin, I'm kind of sad now. I guess I'll need to find a solution for that animation!

[Roei Tzoref]

Ae is 2.5D meaning it is basically flat. there are plugins that allow you to stretch to the Z limit like mettle's freeform that allows you to mesh in 3D. also MaskAvenger that allows you to create spatial points of your vertices that also distort in 3D. other that that, you can always try fake the 3d perspective like some animators do.

like these two:

1. Motion Designer Evan Abrams in a nice series of videos demonstrating creating 3d depth in Ae with shapes : Flat design and the illusion of depth in After Effects | Motion Design Live Stream - YouTube

2. animator James Curran uses all kinds of tricks to fake perspective of a 2d characters. he sometimes uses a 3d software - Maya.

How to create animated GIFs | Adobe Creative Cloud - YouTube

Live Animation with James Curran - DAY 1/3 - YouTube

[stefanov693548]

Hey thanks a lot! That could help me, also because I can now take a look at all those related videos I couldn't find by myself.