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Getting Started with the Puppet Tool in After Effects

by Alex Hernandez

In this series of tutorials, we'll be getting familiar with the puppet tool and the ways you can create great animations by deforming layers in your composition. Software required: After Effects 12.2.1.

What you'll learn

In this series of tutorials, we'll be getting familiar with the puppet tool and the ways you can create great animations by deforming layers in your composition. We'll start by creating pins with the puppet pin tool and learn about the relationship between the pins and how they can work as joints or transform the layer. We'll talk about how the puppet mesh is created and what we can do to override the tool from auto selecting the alpha of the layer. We'll configure the triangle count and expansion of the mesh to get the best results for our needs. Then we'll go over the overlap tool and starch tool to achieve more control over our deformations. We'll finish by talking about using vector layers and nested comps with the puppet tool and what happens with continuously rasterize or collapse transformations selected. By the end of this training you should have a better understanding of the puppet tool and be able to start using it to improve you work. Software required: After Effects 12.2.1.

About the author

Alex is a motion graphics author at Pluralsight. Starting out his career in illustration and design gave Alex a firm foundation in the more traditional forms of art. As he refined his skills, he eventually was pulled into the world of motion animation, as well as product design. It was there that Alex was able to take his artistic skills to new heights and really develop himself as a well-rounded CG artist. Whether you need a better workflow for building website layouts, or a crash course in... more

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