About Character Preparation for a Multi-pose Deformation Rig

Before building a puppet’s deformation skeleton, you must prepare your character. 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 fewer 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 prevent the extremities from being distorted if the limbs are stretched during an action. It will also let you use drawing substitution to swap hands, feet, eyes and mouth poses during animation—see About Swapping Drawings.

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 the following topic to learn how to break down a character: About Character Rigging.