Cut Out Puppet Scaling Problem

Hi to all,

I’m facing a problem with a cut out puppet I’ve made.

I finished my puppet and everything seems to be working properly (pivots, hierarchies etc).

However when I try to import it from the library into a new scene and scale it down, the puppet becomes distorted.

The distortion occurs to those parts that had been positioned to the original puppet to the Front or Back by 0.01 using the offset tool.

I’ve searched for a solution to this, but I haven’t found anything that could help me deal with this problem.

Any suggestions would be more than welcome.

Thanks

It would be better to see your scene to have more information but this mostly happens when there is a transformation under peg in hierarchy when it is rigged. And this might happen due to the images you have created is from outside of Toon Boom Studio and then imported.
For example, you have upper arm, lower arm and hand in hierarchy. If you have created a rig by scaling down the hand and lower arm and moved it to match to the upper and lower arm, the transformation information is already added under hand and lower arm in original (master) rig. Now when you bring it to new scene try to scale down (ex, upper arm), the transform information will be also multiplied under lower arm and hand so in result, lower arm will be smaller and hand will be even much smaller. So it is always recommended to have a normal scale of the parts using drawing select tool instead of transform tool so that you are scaling the actual drawing instead. You can perform this by turning on light table to match all the part.
If you have complete color model, you should import it as it is and then break down in Toon Boom Studio so that all the parts are in right position.
In case you are importing and vectorizing the drawings done break down from outside Toon Boom Studio (ex, Photoshop), create an original file as same resolution as your Toon Boom Studio project and when it is imported, turn off ‘fit image to camera width’. Then it will come as it is and you will have a better environment to rig the charactor.
I hope this helps your issue.

Hi Tochiman,

Many thanks for your detailed post.

However I believe that what is suggested here doesn’t apply to the issue I’m facing.

My scene consists of many drawing elements and effects along with their pegs. So one could say that it is animated to a certain extend.

I assume that you suggest that the problem occurs when the character is imported from a third party software. However in this situation the cut out character has been entirely created and rigged within TBS, so importing it to another scene shouldn’t pose a problem as it does now. In addition to this when I import the character to a blank project and try to scale it down everything works properly.

I have also noticed that the same problem appears even when I import the “Little Boy” cut out character from TBS library templates to the specific scene and try to scale it down.

I start to wonder if there is a generic issue with importing cut out characters to a rather complicated scene and try to scale them down or if the specific scene of mine is problematic.

So far the only work around that seems to do the trick is first to import the character and then import the scene (which I have grouped and saved to the library), but that doesn’t feel the right way to go.

Please correct me if I didn’t understand your point in the first place.

Right. It should not been an issue if the character had a break down from the original character model in Toon Boom Studio as from the sample template in the library.
I would like to see your template since little boy was break down from whole character model without peg scale and position involved from the original model.
I wonder if there was any changes done before you bring it back to library that occurs. Or have you tried importing them to newly create scene into Camera view by dragging and dropping from Library?