The Puppet Tool

Imagine a spider made out of shape layers in which each leg is a stroke. Animating the legs moving would be pretty simple, right? Simply keyframe the stroke path. Now, imagine a spider that’s an image layer, such as a JPEG or PSD. How would you animate that? The answer: The Puppet tool. It’s a great way to bend limbs and add character to raster (that is, pixel-based) images.

Building a Puppet Rig

The technique of preparing an asset for animation is called “rigging.” Imagine you’re Jim Henson and you’ve just built a Kermit the Frog puppet. Rigging is the art of attaching a wire to Kermit’s hand to enable him to gesticulate.

With the Puppet tool, we start rigging by adding pins to our asset. Some pins we will move, which will also move the surrounding pixels. Other pins are there to hold stuff in place, so it doesn’t move.

Start pinning by selecting the Puppet Pin tool from the Toolbar. There are five types of pins in this drop-down; we’ll start with the first, the Puppet Position Pin tool.

Add pins to your raster image by clicking on it. If you’re using pins to move a character’s wrist around, you’ll obviously want a pin in the wrist. However, you’ll also want to add pins to the edges of your image so they hold in place. This part can be a little unpredictable, but it’s easy to go back and revise later. If you notice moving the wrist also moves the feet, simply place pins in the feet to lock them down.

Animating a Puppet Rig

Got pins? Move them! Each pin is automatically keyframed, so all you need to do is hop to a new time, move them around, and you’re animating with puppetry!

Check out the timeline to view the keyframes on your pins. Find them under your layer’s triangle, under Effects > Puppet > Mesh 1 > Deform > Puppet Pin. Since these are Puppet Position Pins, you can only change the pin’s Position. More on that shortly.

The Mesh

Before we start getting all fancy with our pins, let’s rewind and take a look at what the Puppet tool is actually doing. As soon as you add your first pin to an image, After Effects divides the image into a bunch of small triangles. This is called a Mesh. We can look at the Mesh by selecting Show from the Toolbar, provided we’ve added a pin and we have any Puppet tool selected.

Mesh Expansion grows the boundaries of your Mesh just beyond your original artwork. This is helpful to prevent the Puppet tool from excluding little corners of your image—if this still occurs, increase Expansion. Mesh Density is the number of triangles drawn. A higher density produces smoother deformation, but will take more processing time (and increase the chances of After Effects crashing). Both options can also be accessed from the timeline.

Other Types of Pins

While the Puppet Position Pin tool is simple and good for changing an object’s position, let’s check out the other tools. You can either create a different type of pin by selecting it from the Toolbar, or swap Pin Type in the timeline.

The Puppet Starch Pin Tool

Adding a Starch Pin prevents an area from deforming. In my example, the subject’s wrist bends a little too much when the arm moves. By adding a Puppet Starch Pin on the wrist, I prevent deformation from happening. This is different than adding a new Position Pin; a Starch Pin’s position is influenced by the position of other Position Pins. Is that the most one can use the word “position” in a sentence? I’m in no position to argue.

The Puppet Bend Pin Tool

This tool works very similarly to the Puppet Position Pin tool, but instead of manipulating a point’s position, it can modify rotation and scale. When it comes to animating limbs, rotation can look more elegant than position.

The Puppet Advanced Pin Tool

The mother of all Puppet tools, this one has controls for Position, Rotation, and Scale. But it doesn’t end there. The interaction between the Puppet Advanced Pin tool and the Puppet Bend Pin tool is where these two really shine.

While most pins interact independently of one another, the Puppet Advanced Pin tool and the Puppet Bend Pin tool work together. The Puppet Advanced Pin tool is capable of influencing the Puppet Bend Pin tool. I’ll show you a common case study.

In the previous image, I have an Advanced Pin in the elbow and a Bend Pin in the wrist. If I move, rotate, or scale the Advanced Pin, the Bend Pin follows—and the classic Puppet Position Pin in the shoulder remains in place.

This is a great way to build an elegant rig—Advanced Pin at the base, subsequent Bend Pins down the rest. You get more control and are less likely to get weird deformation from two Position Pins not quite aligning.

The Puppet Overlap Pin Tool

This tool gives layers to your rig. Consider this: Here, I have the pen going in front of the character’s face.

What if I wanted it to go behind? The answer: Use the Puppet Overlap Pin tool. It basically assigns Z-depth to various parts of your rig, so you can determine what goes on top and what goes on bottom. If you don’t use the tool, After Effects just guesses what you’d like to be on top. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s not. If it’s not, here’s what to do:

First, select the Puppet Overlap Pin tool. Then, designate a thing to which you’d like to assign Z-depth. In this case, it’s the wrist and pen. However, this tool operates before deformations. As you highlight over your illustration, you’ll see an outline of where the wrist started before you started bending it every which way. That’s what you want to click on.

From either the Toolbar or the new Overlap category listed in the timeline, dial up the Extent until you see the Mesh colored in up to where you’d like this designation to occur. In my case, I want the influence of this Overlap Pin to be the entire wrist.

In Front determines Z-depth. Objects default to 0%, so if I want an object to go behind the default, I dial In Front into a negative percent. In this case, anything lower than -1% is fine, but if one were to create interlocking fingers, one would have to assign each finger a higher percentage than the one below.

Going Further with Character Animation

The Puppet tool is great for simple twists of the wrist and head nods. If you really want to fully animate a character in After Effects, you should look into plug-ins that are built specifically for this purpose.

The biggest character animation deficit in After Effects is the lack of what’s called an IK Handle. IK, or Inverse Kinematics, is a special type of rig that allows you to move a wrist or ankle around, and have the elbow or knee automatically go where it needs to. Animating a wrist and elbow without an IK handle requires two keyframes and has tons of room for human error—an IK handle lets you do it with just one keyframe, which may not sound like much, but it’s a colossal time-saver, and it leads to smoother animation.

So, what plug-ins create IK handles? DUIK is a popular one, particularly since it’s free. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it can be used to create a very powerful rig for characters, in which you parent your shape layers to a prebuilt skeleton that’s already accurately rigged. You can even animate a walk cycle with a single button-click. Find it at https://rainboxlab.org/tools/duik/.

Another one I like is Rubber Hose, which gives you prebuilt shape layers that you can use for arms and legs. It’s by far the fastest way to slap an IK-ready limb into your shot. Find that at https://www.battleaxe.co/rubberhose.

When it comes to rigging faces, nothings beats Joysticks ’n Sliders. You can assign various face positions (say, a smile or frown) to a slider, which is an on-screen element that’s very easy to keyframe. Or, animate a head turning with a joystick. Find it at https://aescripts.com/joysticks-n-sliders/.

Finally, with a Creative Cloud account, you have access to Adobe Character Animator, which lets you animate characters in real-time using your webcam.