The Puppet Pin: ANM201 – Week 10

So this week we are learning about the elusive “Puppet Pin” tool. This is something that I heard of back when I first learned Adobe After Effects, but never had the need or opportunity to use it – until now. As I understand it, the tool allows you to set what amount to joints in a solid bit-mapped image, and gives you the power to transform the image at those points as if you had run a series of bones with joints through it. It's seems to be a bit like rigging bones in Maya. Mind you it's going to be easier since it's in 2D and not 3D, but the problems of distorting the “rig” will probably still exist. This is going to be a big help to me, since I'm hoping to use it in my Sophomore film project (it will save me more than 6 months worth of work if it does), so needless to say I'm looking forward to learning this new tool.