hello and welcome to this after effects tutorial about the puppet pin tools and Louisa Winters here in After Effects let me show you where the puppet pin tools are they are here they're the puppet position starch Bend Advanced and overlap so before we get started let me just give you an idea on how this works and I want you to imagine that your layer whatever it is that you're pinning is made out of rubber and it stretches and you're going to grab a pin and you're going to pin it to a cork board
and then you move that pin because it's pinned only in one place the entire layer moves but if you pin it in two or more places then you are moving only one pin and the other two pins are pinning that layer to the position where they are so it starts stretching and moving and deforming all right so do this with me create a composition and now simply create a rectangle I'm going to make it red with a white stroke and this is what I have and in fact I would like for that stroke to be a little bit
bigger there you go all right now I'm going to grab the first one of the puppet pen tools which is the puppet position pin tool and I want you to notice this as soon as I click there is kind of like a boundary box that appears and then of course I see my PIN if I click here on that little check box next to the word mesh then I see the triangles that form the mesh because what is really happening is that the the layer gets divided in triangles and it is the triangles that we are deforming so rig
ht now my layer is pin only in what place so if I move it there you go it's there's nothing holding it down so I'm going to undo that control or command Z if I pin it in two places or better yet in three places look what happens when I deform this one these two keep the layer where it is and then I am deforming the triangles see now I will undo that notice that there is something called expansion here if I put this to say minus 3 and then I move do you see how the outline of the original layer s
tays in that's because I told the effect so I told the pin 2 that the mesh would be three pixels inside of the area that contains the pixels so I'm going to undo that and now instead of -3 I will have 3 which is the default all right now notice that there is a density here if I change that value to say a 12 you're going to see that we have a heck of a lot more triangles here which means that our deformation can be smoother of course it's going to take longer to render but it will be much smoothe
r look what happens when I bend like this all right I'm going to undo that and I'm going to go back to a 10. in fact I'm going to go back to a 3. look what happens do you see how not smooth this is I see straight lines here and that's because I don't have enough triangles for a smooth curve all right so I will undo again and change this back to 10. all right now if I position the playhead where I want to start my animation and then I press and hold the Ctrl key command on the Mac notice that my
mouse cursor changes into that little keyframe stopwatch icon what that means is that if I click and drag I'm actually recording that motion and I even have keyframes in the timeline so if I play this back there it is and I am indeed keyframing that motion and I see now that three for an expansion is not good enough I'm going to write a five and let's see if that works yeah I think so nope nope no so we're going to do more let's do a 10. and I'm going to delete that puppet and now I'm going to a
dd this again and let me see if I can actually expand it more than that there you go that's an exaggeration but now you can clearly see that the triangles are outside of the boundaries of the rectangle alrighty so there is another option here for record options if you click there add dialog opens up and this is the speed of at which you are recording the animation like when you press and hold the controller command key right so if you do it at 200 for example so 100 is real time right but if you
do it at 200 percent when you record the playhead is gonna go twice as fast which means when you play back it's going to go twice as slow let's show the mesh and here we go look at the playhead it's going twice as fast so when I release the mouse button now the motion is going twice as slow all right so I'm going to undo that and if I go back to record options and instead of 200 I put 50 when I move so this is for precision right so when I'm moving the pin the playhead is going twice as slow wh
ich means when it plays back it will be twice as fast let's go ahead and do that and there it is and you can clearly see that that is exactly what is happening all right I'm going to undo that and I'm going to get rid of the puppet pin tools because I want to talk about a different pin tool now in fact I want to talk about the puppet starch tool which is the next one if I start something like here and here I want you to notice that immediately as soon as I put those two pins do you see how these
triangles became more dense in between those two points look on this side one and two see how they are denser look what happens now when I use the puppet position pin tool so one two and three if I deform this those parts are a little bit stiffer all right so this is relatively speaking no there used to be a puppet starch pin tool in earlier versions of after effects in which you would control the influence and the strength of the starch but now there are no options but you can see clearly that
is happening automatically all right so I am going to recommend that if you're going to the form using the position or any of the other tools that you actually add the starch uh pin tools before so that you can clearly see what is happening with the mesh and yes show the mesh all right so I'm going to go ahead and delete that puppet effect because I want to talk about some melts I want to talk about the puppet Bend pin tool right so I'm going to do the same thing one two and three and I want yo
u to notice now in the timeline that I have scale and rotation available for each one of my pins and yes keyframes were added automatically and in fact I'm going to move them to the beginning of my composition look what happens when I rotate I'm going to rotate this one see it I'm going to rotate this one now look at that and yes all of these can be animated and finally the last one but I don't just have a rotation I also have scale look at this point smaller bigger doesn't it look like 3D this
amazing stuff I'm gonna make this one smaller and I'm going to make this one even smaller look at that I love it all right so I'm going to go ahead and delete this only because I want to show you one more tool and that is go ahead and delete it that is this tool which is the puppet Advanced pin tool if I just click in three places like we've been doing notice that this one is coming with a circle and if you look in the timeline now I can control position scale and rotation so I can rotate and I
can control scale like this just using the circle or of course I can also scrub these in the timeline and of I have the added position so this is like an all-in-one tool right all right so I'm going to go ahead and delete this and I'm going to create another bar this time longer and thinner all right I'm going to use either the the you can use either the puppet Advanced pin tool or the puppet position pin tool and let's just pin it in a couple of places I'm going to lower this one here and I'm g
oing to bring this one yay and this one yay right and I'm going to rotate them there you go like that and in fact I think I'm going to rotate this one like yeah as well and there you go so I have something like this now I'm going to zoom in just so that you see what's going on this side is above the other side and I don't want that all right so I don't want for this side to be above so it's like this and I want it to be like this that is what the puppet overlap pin tool does so now I'm going to
select the puppet overlap tool and I'm going to select the layer and we are going to see that the original the original shape of the the layer appears in here I'm going to apply the puppet overlap tool here on this side so on the left and now we are going to see the overlap here in the timeline and we can change now position in front and extent let's change the extent you see how as I increase the value more and more of these triangles are selected now I can change the in front value and voila I
have it now the way that I want it now that we have the basis of the puppet pin tool let's just use it in something other than a stick so let's go ahead and import a file that we have in the exercise files under the Illustrator files and the file is called girl.ai and let's just import it as footage because it's going to be one and only layer and let's create a composition let's call it girl and let's add the girl to that composition if you don't have those files you can download them uh the li
nk to download those files is in the description of this video and these are the files that I've been using so far for almost every single one of my of my videos all right so here we go I'm going to go ahead and reduce the scale of this so to about yay and this is good and now I'm going to use the puppet position pin tool and I'm going to pin right here and here and at the top at the knee and at the bottom of each leg at the top elbow and bottom of each arm and now we can simply start animating
so press and hold Ctrl and I'm just going to pop the head a little bit like that not too much now the arms the other arm the leg and that leg and now I will select the layer press the letter u and these are our all of my keyframes right I can now separate these keyframes a little bit more to have them go a little bit slower and in fact I can just select them all press and hold alt and then click on the last one and see how they go like an accordion right I'll do the same with this one here and I
don't want it super slow but a little bit slower than what they've been going at and that's the last one let me get it there again oh one more this is just the bopping of the head and you can see that she's just moving so you can just choose how to animate these things for any kind of cartoons or logos or anything that you want to do let's go ahead and delete this layer and let's import a different file let's go ahead and import doggy dot AI and merged is fine and we're going to put the doggie
here in the timeline and this time I want to use the puppet Advanced pin tool I'm going to pin each one of the eyes the middle of the body and I think just the tip of the nose all right so now I will animate the tip of the nose like yay and there it is no I don't like that I'm going to undo that I think I'm going to use the puppet position pin tool and I'm going to pin the top and the bottom of each leg and also the body and now there that's what I'm talking about so the dog can be sniffing like
this that's awesome all right and let's see what that did I love it and now we can actually change the scale of these eyes so that they just like bulge a little bit right and this is just too silly for words right and we can animate all of that and then finally you know I'm just gonna move the legs like this and like this and I'm just doing silly stuff right and there you go and now all I have left to do is reduce the scale of the doggy I'm going to put the doggy here and we'll animate position
so that it goes from right to left and they said going it should walk well it it works better if I actually keyframe it you know it does work better if I do keyframe it and here we go so you can create your own animations like that and this is just cartoonish and all of that but there is just one more that I want to show you and I'm just going to show it to you with one but it's these Vines right so I'm going to choose to import this as composition layer size and like I said I'm going to do thi
s with just one Vine so I'm going to swallow this Vine and I'm going to use the puppet position pin tool and I'm going to pin it here in here and here I'm going to change that expansion to a 3. and I'm just going to animate this a tiny little bit so this and this right so you I'll select these keyframes and now expand them a little bit like yay so that they are slower right and I'm going to do that with every single layer all right then I'm going to position the layers in different um z a positi
on for 3D something like this so people position like the bottom one is going to go all the way to the back and then subsequent they're going to become closer and closer to the camera I'm just going to add a light and with that animation and I'm going to finish this with a background I'm going to be left with something that really has depth and this a heck of a lot more original than we have seen uh these puppet things to be used [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] in addition to that you can
use the puppet pin tool in actual video layers so you can actually if you have a video of say smoke or particles or explosion or whatever you can actually guide those things whatever you want by deforming the entire layer and putting it where you need to put it all right so this brings us to the end of this tutorial on the puppet pin tool I hope you enjoyed it if you did please don't forget to hit like And subscribe and thank you for watching and I hope to see you next time foreign
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