Masking in Illustrator + Frames per second

[Rob Brod]

Hi all,

I've two questions:

1.  I've masked some layers in Adobe Illustrator.  When the puppet with masking is brought into CA, none of the masks are working - all the areas that are masked show up.  How might I resolve this, either in Illustrator or in CA?

2.  When I do playback on a puppet, on a new Surface Pro that's quite high spec'd, I'm regularly getting 6.5 fps rather than 24.  Is there any way to speed this up?

Many thanks,

Rob

[Jeff Almasol]

Clipping guides are not supported from Illustrator, so you will need to set them up for use in the Puppet panel in Character Animator.

Are you rendering as vectors or as image. Select the puppet in the Project panel, then look at the top of the Properties panel. Is Render as Vector checked? Does unchecking it help performance?

Do you have a lot of nonindependent groups (groups without crowns in the Puppet panel)? Do you have a deeply nested artwork structure?

[Rob Brod]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for coming back to me on this.

For my Illustrator file, it was both

(a) quite large

(b) has a lot of nested art work.

I've exported it as a Photoshop file and merged all the groups where possible.  It's now reacting at a much faster 23 fps, rather than 3.5!

Many thanks,

Rob

[Jeff Almasol]

Glad the Photoshop workaround got better performance.

It might be good to understand the slowdown for the AI file, so if you still have it and are willing to share it with us for diagnosis, feel free to send me a shared link (via Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) for the file. You can send the shared link via direct message if needed.

Thanks.

[Rob Brod]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for this.  I've just sent this to you via direct message.  Let me know what you think with regards to why it's too slow. 

Rob

[Jeff Almasol]

Thanks, Rob. A lot of layers are on the same mesh, so if you can make things independent (with the crown icon) that might help. Also, removing any hidden layers that aren't used can help, too. We'll continue to look at this.