Masks are super useful in many adobe apps and can fix a number of issues in character animator. Okay? So one of the most common issues with a puppet in character animator has to do with pupils and eyeballs. 

So if we look at Rob here, you can see that his eyes actually stay pretty well inside. I would point out that with the eye gaze movement, if you just launch a sort of default character, it's going to be on camera input, and that can be a little bit unpredictable. So I typically switch it off of camera input to keyboard input, and that will allow you to do the arrows to move the pupils, which is great, however oftentimes a puppet. If I switch to roberta here. So let's turn the visibility on for her. Turn the visibility off for Rob. I've also got her armed for record. If I don't have that, she's not going to move. Okay. So I've got to have both. I got to be able to see her and have her sort of ready to be recorded. 

Okay, so with her eye gaze, if I'm on keyboard input, and if it's at, let's say, 100 or so, notice that the eyes don't quite stay within the eyeball, which is a problem. To the rescue comes masks. And this is just one popular use for masks. There's a lot of other great use cases, but let's go ahead and hop into the source file for roberta and see how we might use masks to solve that problem. 

All right, so if we do a little bit of eyeball anatomy, I have a blank object that's made up of a lash and a lid. And it's got to have a lid just so that it covers the tuple. Okay. And there is a lash that goes on top. If I turn off that blank object, I've got the lash that's sort of always there when her eyes open. And then I've got the eyeball. 

Now what I'd like to be able to do is sort of constrain all of this content, including the pupil inside of this same object, and that's what a mask will do. So all I need to do is go to the eyeball and copy it. Okay, that's the start. So I'm going to take command C. Command B, as in boy to paste behind. Okay. If you're on a PC, that's going to be control c, control B. 

Now that I've got a copy, here's the trick. I need this not to be inside of this group, and I need it to actually be right below it. And the layer hierarchy here is a little bit tricky to work with. So this is going to look funny, but I'm going to drag this up here. All right. I'm going to call it Mask. And what I need to do is collapse this group and stick my mask right underneath. Okay. So in other words, the mask cannot be inside of the group. It has to be just below and outside the group that I'm trying to mask.

All right, I'm going to do it again for the left eye. So I'm going to hit command C, command B, and I'm going to drag it up here. I'll call this one Mask, and then I'll collapse that group and I'll stick that mask under there. 

Okay, so I've got two masks for both eyes. And now I can go to File and Save back at the ranch. In character animator, nothing really has changed because I haven't told it to mask yet. And I do that in the rigging panel. So if I go to the rigging panel and here we've got roberta, and there's your head. And we can see I've got mask one and it's a named it Mask Tube just because it saw that there was one layer already called that. 

And here's how we do it in character animator. If I select the right eye, I want it to basically only be constrained to the path of this mask. And to do that, I go up to Puppet and I go to create clipping Mask. Okay. And I get a nice little arrow that says, hey, only this stuff or all this stuff only fits into this shape. All right? And I'll do the same thing to the left eye. I'm going to puff it, create clipping Mask, and that's going to project or sort of mask inside this area. All right, very exciting. So now that when I go to record, if I hit the left and right button, notice how her eyes are constrained inside that mask area, which is exactly what I want. 

Now, there's a lot of other use cases for masks and some of these can get pretty complicated. If you go to the welcome screen, which you can also get to by going to Window and welcome, there is a puppet that you might check out just as an extreme use case. So this puppet that I designed for adobe Footy has some really complex masking behaviors going on, but it's the reason that his head looks sort of 3d. 

If I go in and I check out Footy, you can see if I could edit original. It looks super crazy. Yeah, but the reason that his head is able to look like it's 3d is because most of his head has been stuck inside this mask. So this pattern is allowed to float around with a property called parallax, but it's exactly the same workflow. All of this has been masked inside here. If you're curious about the whole nose thing, the nose is the object closest to you. So it's the one that's allowed to move the most when we're applying parallax. More on this later. 

But here's an extreme example that you might play with. And yes, it's a vulnerable zeala that you can make play back in character animator. All right, now we have to do it right yeah. So you can see here's all my triggers, including if I hit t. There you go. All right. So a little bit on the power of masks in character, animator.