Now that you understand Rigging, time to bring in a character from adobe illustrator and get it ready for action in the project bin. Right. And I've just got magnus, and normally I would start a new project if I wanted to bring in a new puppet, but I do want to compare the new puppet to magnus. So I'm actually going to keep this same project going. 

So I'm going to go to file and import and in the project files, I'm going to import rawsource AI. So it's not a puppet file, it's an illustrator file. So this is the raw sort of illustrator vector graphics brought into character animator, and immediately it's turned it into a puppet, but I don't see it. So again, I'm going to drag it on down to the timeline. And you can see I actually have two puppets here, so I really don't want that. So I'm going to go ahead and delete magnus. That doesn't delete it from the project, just from the timeline. magnus is still with us. 

Okay, now right now, Rob is doing nothing. He's not moving because of two things. Number one, I need to turn the camera on. Number two, I need to arm Rob for recording. So if I click on Rob, notice that the little red dot comes on. And now I'm getting some motion tracking. Okay? 

So immediately, hopefully, you see that Rob is sort of floating in space, and that's not really what I'm looking to do. So let's talk about locking him down and why he floats and why magnus doesn't. I'm going to get a magnus here, double click on him, and that's going to bring up the rig panel. And notice that magnus has a head that's independent from its body. That is, when I select head, I get a big yellow circle around his sort of head, and then the body is actually just the feet. 

Now, if we compare this if we go back to our project panel, we compare this to Rob. Notice that when I click on rob's head, everything is one big yellow selection around it. Nothing is independent. That is, the head has not been made independent from the body. Okay, now, this is actually probably a good thing. And here's why. 

If I go in here and I make the head independent in this case, this is kind of a personal preference thing, but notice that now his head does rotate and his body does stay locked down, but frankly, I think that looks weird. So let's go ahead and undo that. So I go to my history and undo that, and let's actually just lock this part down and make him move a little bit more naturally and organically. 

To do that, I'm going to go back and double click on Rob, which is going to launch Rigging here. I could just click rig Two, though, and instead of making his head sort of float and his body sort of artificially stick. What you can do is you can select at the top level here, the Rob puppet, and use some of the great rigging tools down here to lock or fix certain things down. 

Now, you could use the pin tool, and that would pin a bunch of little spots here and change the mesh. Okay, so let's see what that see what that is? If I show the mesh right now, you can see there's a lot of tight mesh here and a lot of big space here. And we actually kind of want the opposite. We want all of this to get locked. 

Now, if I use the pins, you can see that the mesh gets tighter here, and that will lock it down. But I might need a lot of these, and it can get kind of busy looking. So a better way to do it I'll hit Command Z there a couple of times, is to use the stick tool. 

And what's nice about the Stick tool is that you can actually label the stick as one big fixed modified object. To do that, if I go over to modifiers here, you can see I could say, hey, let's make that fixed, and I'll get the little fixed tag. Okay, so let's go back and test drive. I go back to record and notice that he's moving a lot better, and I'm getting a little bit of that sort of nice little shoulder action. 

Okay, now, a couple of other little things I'd want to change. Right now, I'm seeing some weirdness here, so I need to move him down, and I'd really like his head not to scale quite so much. So another kind of classic thing you're going to need to do is play with some of the puppet behaviors over here.

 So I'm going to go to Face, and you can see there's a lot of options for Face. The big one right now that I'm seeing as I go back and forth is that the head looks really weird and disproportional. You can hit set, rest, pose, and the proportions are going to be better, but I just don't want it to ever sort of naturally scale. So under the face behavior, you can see I've got head scale strength, and if I crank it up or down, it's going to much more dramatically affect the scaling. I typically put this really low. Okay. So I'm putting it at 3%. All right. 

The next thing I'd probably want to do is move the whole character down, because he's actually touching the top of the frame. To do that, I need to just slide on down in the properties panel, and you can see that you can actually just move the puppet down. 

All right, so Rob is now sort of ready to roll. He's anchored down. Yeah, he's got a much more natural look to him, and he's in a good spot to start animating.