Preparing the Character

You need to prepare your character before building a puppet’s deformation skeleton. The best way to proceed is to have the limbs on separate drawing layers, this is similar to a standard cut-out puppet preparation, but uses less pieces. Since this is a more advanced type of puppet you should keep the character’s head, hands, feet and facial features on a separate layer from the body, arms and legs. This will avoid the extremities from being distorted if the limbs are stretched during an action. It will also let you use the drawing substitution to swap hands, feet, eyes and mouth poses during animation.

There are many ways to break down a cut-out puppet. The example described in this chapter uses these pieces:

Body
Left Ear
Right Ear
Head
Left Eye
Right Eye
Mouth
Left Eyebrow
Right Eyebrow
Nose
Left Arm
Right Arm

 

Left Hand
Right Hand

 

Left Leg
Right Leg

 

Left Foot
Right Foot
Refer to Swapping Images to learn more about drawing substitution.

Refer to the following topics to learn how to breakdown your character:
Importing a Model
Relative Sizes
Studying the Model
Breaking Down the Character
Adding Extra Drawings

Related Topics 

Creating a Full Character Turnaround Deformation Rig
Enabling the Posed Deformer Preference
Renaming the Drawings
Rigging the Parts
Assembling the Parts