Puppet

The Puppet tool poses a drawing by pinning it. Tap the character to drop pins, then drag a pin to move it. Pinned spots hold, and the rest of the drawing bends smoothly and rigidly between them — the form wraps and turns rather than shearing, because the deformation is fitted as a rotation rather than smeared as a stretch.

Pulling a pin toward the viewer folds the drawing in three dimensions. Orbit the viewport with two fingers to see the fold.

Adding a puppet#

With the Puppet tool selected and no rig on the active layer, the panel reads "Pose a character by pinning it and dragging. Works on a drawn or imported-image plane layer."

The mesh conforms to the drawing. Cells are kept only where the artwork actually is, plus about one cell of expansion past the silhouette, and the artwork's own alpha clips the rest. This is what separates a puppet from a perspective warp: a lattice over a bounding box distorts a rectangle, while a mesh that covers only the opaque area wraps and bends the form. If nothing in the layer tests as inside, the mesh falls back to the full rectangle so the tool still works.

Controls#

The panel reads "Tap the character to drop pins, then drag a pin to pose it. Pinned spots hold; the rest bends smoothly and rigidly between them. Pull a pin toward you (orbit with two fingers) to fold in 3D."

Beneath Detail the panel reports the derived figure — "n triangles wrapping the artwork" — and above it the pin count. The two numbers are deliberately both shown: Detail is what you set, triangles is what you get.

How posing behaves#

The pins are solved as a rigid deformation. Nearby pins dominate a given part of the drawing, and their influence falls away with distance, so the field varies smoothly across the mesh. Three guarantees follow from that, and they are worth knowing because they explain what you will see:

• Moving every pin the same way moves the drawing exactly, with no distortion at all.
• A single pin is pure translation. A puppet with one pin slides; it does not spin about it.
• A pin holds its own spot exactly. What you drag goes where you put it.

A puppet with no pins is the identity — the artwork is untouched until the first pin exists and moves.

Folding in three dimensions#

Each pin's displacement out of the layer's plane is spread across the mesh with the same falloff as its in-plane motion, which produces a smooth fold rather than a crease. Every point's own existing off-plane offset is preserved through the solve, which is what lets a drawing that already has depth keep its parallax while it is being posed.

Animating pins#

A pin pose is keyframable. The whole pin set is one channel — Puppet (pins) — on the layer's row in the Timeline, and it follows the ordinary channel-armed model: the first key is explicit, and every pin drag afterwards writes a key at the playhead. Pin keys are eased by default.

Poses are matched by pin identity, not by index, so pins added or removed between two keys degrade gracefully: an unmatched pin holds the key it does appear in. The mesh and its resolution are structure and never animate — only where the pins sit does.

In the graph editor a pin pose is a non-scalar channel and is plotted as eased progress: you shape how fast the pose travels, not its values.

Pins on a rigged layer#

When a layer carries both bones and pins, the pins act on top of the skeleton, as residual tweaks. Each pin's anchor rides the bone pose, so an untouched pin holds the drawing exactly where the bones put it; a dragged pin nudges the posed artwork locally. This is also the mechanism behind the Rig tool's stored joint fixes.

See also#