All in all, a successful first day. At this point in the training video, it goes on to tell you how to create multiple head views so you can turn your head. The narrator says if this is your first puppet, skip that step and come back to it when you are on your second or third puppet, because doing this step requires "group restructuring in Illustrator" and that can break your and rigging in Character Animator. So this seems like a good place to stop for the day.

I. Hate. Layers.

No, I really hate layers. I really, really do. Bigly.

So, what did I learn today.

1. I hate layers. Seriously.
2. When the guy doing the training video says to skip this step if this is your first puppet, LISTEN TO HIM.
3. Mistakes can be fixed. But always save a copy before you start venturing into unknown waters.
4. You can learn effectively from mistakes, just not very efficiently. But sometimes a Milky Way makes it less painful.
5. Know when to walk away.
6. I still hate layers.

After having had a successful first day with my puppet, I got cocky and decided to ignore Training Guy's suggestion to skip the head turning step. Big mistake. Big. Huge. But I couldn't see doing my Digital Video assignment without being able to turn my head, so I plunged ahead...so to speak.

This is where I started with the video tutorial, about 23 minutes in.

The first step is to create another head group out of the existing head group, rename the existing head goup +Frontal, and then duplicate it for the left and right quarter and profile views. Easy peasy, right? This should have been my first warning that this would not go well.

As far as I could tell, I did exactly what Training Guy did, but I kept getting an error message that said, "Can't make a group of objects that are within different groups." Ok. Well. Don't know what that means; I have it set up just like Training Guy, and he didn't have that problem. Googling the error meassage killed about a half hour but did not offer a solution that worked.

I finally figured out a work around, by drawing an object, making it a group, calling the group Head, and then moving the old Head group into it, renaming old head +Frontal, and deleting the object I had drawn. Then I was able to duplicate the Frontal layer by alt-dragging it to make my left profile and left quarter views.

I then selected the eyes, nose, and mouth groups and moved them over to their new positions in each part of the head turn. I tilted the ice mountain crown in each view. Then I decided to add a shadow to empasize the turn. To build the shadow, I duplicate the head shape twice, changed the color and opacity of one, move the other one to form a crescent, and use the pathfinder tool to delete the front and leave the crescent as a shadow, with a slightly bigger shadow on the profile than the quarter view. That all seemed to go well.

Or so I thought. There is a reason I hate layers.

I thought maybe I had to retag things on my puppet, but the problem was in my Illustrator file. Remember how I left my file yesterday, with the extra layers for the angry face and talking mouth shapes hidden?

I started out Day Two by saving this as PlutoDay Two in case I screwed things up. Then I followed the steps I described above...without unhiding any of the things I had hidden.

Turns out, if you select a group and duplicate it, you don't duplicate the layers you have hidden. Did I mention I hate layers? All my screwy mouth and blinky eye jumps were because I did not unhide those layers before I moved the visible ones...so they didn't move with the others. They DUPLICATED when I duplicated the head group, but they didn't MOVE when I moved the subgroups. I don't get the logic of that. Once I figured that out, I decided it was easier to unhide everything and move the leftovers into place than to start over.

I had to retag a few things in Character Animator, and setup the keyboard triggers for the angry face and worried eyebrows for each of the new views, and that seemed to do the trick.

I still need to tweak the eye tilt for certain views, but it's not bad. Oh crap. I just realized my left turn is really a right turn...I forgot it's the puppet's left, not mine. But, that should be easy to fix, right? Just rename the layer.

Now I need to do my right turns, or my real left turns since I renamed my old ones to right turns. I'm so confused. I duplicated the renamed layers, and renamed them again to left profile and quarter. But now I had to turn them into actual left turns instead of right turns. So I had the "bright" idea of just selecting the group and reflecting it. Smart, hunh?

Yea, not so much. Because I reflected EVERYTHING, my left and right eyes were switched. I started renaming them, realized what a nightmare that would be, so I decided it was time to walk away. Literally. Took a walk down the hallway, saw no one was in the building, decided to grab a Milky Way out of the vending machine, and watched CNN try to explain Sean Spicer's explanations of the President's morning tweets. That was entertaining enough to let my mind figure out a better fix to the mess I made.

Rather than rename everything, I deleted the layer and redid it. This time I just reflected the nose, crown, and shadow, and then moved them into the right place. Then I selected the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth - making sure EVERYTHING in each group was visible (fool me once...) - and shifted them to the right. When I did the original turn layers, I shifted them 4 shift-arrow keystrokes on each layer, so I knew exactly how many keystrokes it would take to get back to center and then to the same position on the other side. Mathematical OCD...

Save and go back to Character animator. Unfortunately, because I renamed all my left-right turn layers, all my keystroke commands were broken. It isn't hard to reset them but it is tedius. For each thing that moves with a keystroke, you need to:

1. Select item that moves.
2. Enter the keystroke letter.
3. Check the box to hide the other objects in the group.
4. Apply the Cycle Layers behavior.
5. Set the options for the behavior.

For the angry face, I need to do that for the right eyebrow, left eyebrow, right eylid, left eyelid, and mouth. On each head group - right profile and quarter, frontal, and left profile and quarter. That's 5 steps for 5 items on 5 head groups...for 125 steps to make a frowning face. Just something to consider when you are making facial epressions for your puppet.

When you ae doing that, it's easier to hide the head groups you aren't working with at the time. I had a moment of panic as I was resetting the keystrokes for the angry eyelids, and my right angry eyelid seemed to be showing up somewhere over my nose as you can see in the image on the left. However, I was working with a lower layer (head group), so once I hid the ones I wasn't working with, it showed me which lid I had actually chosed, and I could see it in the right place in the image on the right.

It took me all afternoon, but I finally got my head to turn...along with my eyes and mouth. It still needs fine tuning, and I need to fix the inability to talk with the angry face. I think I can do that by copying the mouth sounds group to the angry mouth group and make sure they still tag to the right sounds. I'm not very confident in that solution - if it doesn't work, I just won't talk while frowning - but it's worth a try.

So, OK, maybe I don't hate layers. Maybe I just don't appreciate them yet. When I was in grad school, I had to read Zen and the Art of Motorycle Maintenance, A Brave New World, and 1984 and use them to write a paper about the quality of instructional design. One of my points was that what we consider as quality changes over the years. I used the example of spinach. When you are a child, you might view spinach as having low quality, because it's green and slimy and it tastes icky. As an adult, you might consider it high quality because you have learned to appreciate its nutritional value and the fiber in it, and you learned how to cook it better than your mother did.

So maybe I'm still a child when it comes to layers. Maybe when I have more experience with them, I will no longer consider them icky and will learn to appreciate their usefulness. And maybe I just hate layers.

But working with layers is better than trying to explain Trump's tweets, so I guess they aren't all bad.

Not too much accomplished today; real work interfered.

I added a body to Pluto. I took the one from the original illustration I had done and made some modifications. I had to make a few changes, including swapping out the curved arms (which I liked because they look like an orbital plot) for straight arms, and made them and the legs thicker. I put everything on layers (ACK!) - torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg, and grouped everything into a body.

I brought it into a new character animator project; I did that for each of the first two days, because I want a "safe" backup point, but now it's becoming tedious, since I need to redo all the keystroke stuff. Might need to rethink that strategy.

Adding the structure for the arms and legs was easy and logical....but they don't work the way I think they should. My arms and legs were just strokes rather than shapes, so that may be the reason for the Gumby arms and legs. Tomorrow I'll try to replace those with shape-based arms and legs and see if that helps. Also, I don't like the way the right arm and leg are behind the torso while the left ones are in front. That's the way the video describes doing it, but that character is turned to the right a bit, while mine faces forward. I'm going to look at other sample characters to find a forward facing one and see how that one works,

I'm beginning to appreciate layers. A little bit. Maybe.

Relatively little accomplished today. I hate when real work interferes with fun work. I changed the arms and legs from the thick, black strokes to rectangles with a gradiant color to see if that stopped my Gumby arms and legs. It didn't...and then, after I spent the time doing that, I thought to open one of the sample puppets. It had Gumby arms and legs, too. So that just means I need to be careful when dragging arms and legs around. I may also go back to the original black stick legs, because I just like that look; it make the body look more like a planet.

I also started working on my second character Uranus, a lovely light teal blue ice giant. This is where layers actually came in handy! There are five head views; I was able to open them all up, select just the head, and change the color on all of them at one time. I could recolor the shadow and the eyelids the same way, so that was cool. So maybe layers aren't totally evil.

Uranus still needs a lot of work, but other than going back to the original arms and legs, Pluto is in pretty good shape. I also found a background I like. Working with backgrounds in Character Animator is a little weird. You import them the same way you do puppets, but you just don't set any of the rigging.

Here is the day four test. Nothing much different, but each time I do this I learn a bit more.

Tomorrow I think I will try to make Pluto walk. That means I need to make a side view of Pluto, which should be relatively easy (famous last words...). Then I'll finish up Uranus, and then I'll finally be ready to work on creating scenes for my knock-knock joke video.

Well, making the side view was easy, but tedious. I went back to a plainer version of the legs, but not the straight black. I chose a gray to coordinate with the crown and texturized them. A little more interesting than plain black, but puts the focus back on the round planet body.

After that, making the profile view was easy; just a matter of deleting the left side of the face and moving the right side over. The worst part was modifying the visemes. I had grabbed them from a sample puppet, and they were not drawn the way I would have drawn them (way too may anchor points, not enough handles), so it took way too long to redo them as half of what they were. But they are done, and I just need to copy and reflect to get the left profile.

The New Features April 2017 video explains the Walk behavior. It is really simply once you have your puppet set up. You just apply the behavior, mark your handles, and away you go.

So here is Pluto walking and talking (well, "singing," sort of). I exported this as an .mp4 with the Media Encoder, and then brought it into Premiere Pro to do a little trimming and to add some audio effects.

I did this at the very end of the day. I want to play with stride length and and such to try to stop the sliding of the feet. I also think the body deforms a bit too much when I walk, so I'm going to see if there is an option to fix that. Tomorrow I should be able to do the left profile and put all three views together into one puppet....should be able to...

Yes, I did actually take time to make Pluto "moonwalk" on the Moon...but it really didn't take long, and I learned a bit more about the Walk behavior. Played the Billy Jean video in another browser window to capture the audio in Animator, exported it to MP4 and trimmed it up in Premiere. You can trim in Animator, but it wasn't working the way I thought it should, and didn't want to take any more time to figure out how to do something I could easily do in Premiere.

This is an actual panoramic photo from the Apollo missions to the Moon! I tried importing it as a .jpeg into Animator for a background, but that wasn't working, so I opened it in Photoshop and saved it out that way. You can easily import both Photoshop and Illustrator projects in to Animator.

In other words, I did this and actually learned that certain things didn't work the way I wanted them to...but I didn't want to spend a lot of time on figuring out why, so I did workarounds. A perfectly fine problem-solving method...that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

After last night's live class, I started thinking about how to do different shots in Character Animator. It's designed primarily to do a single view with the character looking straight at the "camera." Your character can walk across the screen, but only in a straight line, parallel to the bottom of the scene. I THINK I know how to put two puppets in a scene, but even at that, they can only face each other.

After class, I started thinking about how I could do a shot-reverse shot sequence. First up was to come up with the background scene to use. I had one I was going to use, but again, it was only good for head-on or face-to-face shots. So I ended up drawing my own in Illustrator. It won't get me a true "180" view...more like about 120 degrees, but it's not bad, and if I had more time and talent, I would skew it more to make it closer to 180. I'm going to have to modify the "frontal" view of my puppets so they are more like 3/4 views, and come up with a back view. The 3/4 front view will involve mainly turning the body, and adjusting which head view goes with which tag in Animator. Good thing about the back view is they can be pretty static.

This is today's work, the background and compositing the three views of Pluto into one image. Each view has to be its own group on its own *cough*hack*wheeze* layer. Somehow I ended up with a phantom paint layer that I couldn't select, so I had to drag it out of all groups, group the other layers, and then I could copy that group to the main puppet Illustration.