Use the Puppet tools to quickly add natural motion to raster images and vector graphics, including still images, shapes, and text characters.

To see a video tutorial on using the Puppet tools, visit the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/vid0274.

The Puppet effect works by deforming part of an image according to the positions of pins that you place and move. These pins define what parts of the image should move, what parts should remain rigid, and what parts should be in front when parts overlap.

Each Puppet tool is used to place and modify a specific kind of pin:

Puppet Pin tool

Use this tool to place and move Deform pins.

Puppet Overlap tool

Use this tool to place Overlap pins, which indicate which parts of an image should appear in front of others when distortion causes parts of the image to overlap one another.

Puppet Starch tool

Use this tool to place Starch pins, which stiffen parts of the image so that they are distorted less.

Puppet mesh created by placing Deform pins (left), and result of dragging a Deform pin

When you move one or more Deform pins, the mesh changes shape to accommodate this movement, while keeping the overall mesh as rigid as possible. The result is that a movement in one part of the image causes natural, life-like movement in other parts of the image.

For example, if you place Deform pins in a person’s feet and hands and then move one of the hands to make it wave, the motion in the attached arm will be large, but the motion in the waist will be small, just as in the real world.

If a single animated Deform pin is selected, its Position keyframes are visible in the Composition panel and Layer panel as a motion path. You can work with these motion paths as you work with other motion paths, including setting keyframes to rove across time. (See Smooth motion with roving keyframes.)

You can have multiple meshes on one layer. This is useful for deforming several parts of an image individually—such as text characters—as well as for deforming multiple instances of the same part of an image, each with a different deformation.

The original, undistorted mesh is calculated at the current frame at the time at which you apply the effect. The mesh does not change to accommodate motion in a layer based on motion footage, nor does the mesh update if you replace a layer’s source footage item.

The motion created by the Puppet tools is sampled by motion blur if motion blur is enabled for the layer and the composition, though the number of samples used is half of the value specified by the Samples Per Frame value. (See Use motion blur.)

You can use expressions to link the positions of Deform pins to motion tracking data, audio amplitude keyframes, or any other properties.

Aharon Rabinowitz provides a tutorial that shows a creative way to use the Puppet tools with a particle generator to simulate airflow over a car: www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_aharonpuppetparticles.