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Some characters may be difficult to breakdown as cut-out puppets. For example, a snake is built out of one long shape, as are a tiger’s tail, a necklace or anything with a segmented body. To animate a snake’s body, you are generally required to draw it frame by frame as a whole piece.
It can be very time consuming to animate a story and you don’t necessarily want to wait two or three months for it to be completed.
With Digital Pro you can have it ready in a week or two!

In this article you will see how to adapt some of your character designs and animate them as cut-out puppets using the Inverse Kinematics tool! We will guide you and show you how to build a cut-out snake puppet. Get ready to unleash your stories!

Getting the Sample Material Required

To perform this exercise, you will need to download the following sample material provided with this article.

- IK_Snake.zip

If you want to see an example of a cut-out snake puppet download this Digital Pro sample scene.

If you require more information about the following steps, refer to the Digital Pro User Guide.

The first step in creating your snake is to draw its basic outline. A rough idea of the character’s skeleton is all you need.

The idea behind this is to develop a guideline in which to place your puppets pieces. You will breakdown the head and the body into several parts that you will attach o ne to the other as a chain.

Your snake will end up looking a bit like a pearl necklace. Don’t be reluctant to add colour and create funny shapes. Since you are already creating a special look, why not go all the way!

Once you have an idea of how you want your snake to look, you need to add the number of layers you require. You do this in the Timeline view. Each segment of the snake will be placed in an individual layer. In this example, we added fifteen layers.

You can now start drawing the body shapes in their respective layers. You can see these parts as being each vertebrae of a long spine.

When you build a snake in this manner you can add as much detail as you want and even draw each little scale if you feel like it since you only need to draw the character once.

Once your pieces are drawn, you have to set your drawing pivots. All the pieces rotate around their rotation point. By default this is set at the centre of the Camera view. You will need to reposition the pivot at the centre or end of each piece.

To reposition the pivot, use the Select tool, located in the Drawing Tools toolbar and hold down the [Ctrl] key on Windows or [] key on Mac OS X, then click in the area where you want to position your pivot. The pivot will then be placed at that location.

Now that you have created all of the snake’s pieces, you are ready to attach them to each other.

The first step in the rigging process is to add pegs to each part of the snake’s body. You add the parent pegs by selecting all of your layers in the Timeline view and by pressing the Add Parent Peg button.

You should use the Network view for this it will help you to understand the way the snake is constructed.

In the Network view, you will need to activate the drawing pivots you just set on your drawings. Select all the modules in the Network view and in the Scripting toolbar, click on the Enable Drawing Pivots button.

In the Network view, connect the Head Peg’s output port to the first Body Peg’s input port.

Then, connect the first body part to the second one, then the second to the third and so on, until you reach the end.

Finally, you should end up with a complete module cascade.

Before animating your snake, collapse all of your layers in the Timeline view and add a keyframe on the first frame by pressing the [F6] key.

Now, you are ready to animate!

In the Animation Tools toolbar, select the Inverse Kinematics tool and enable the Keyframe mode.

To animate with the Inverse Kinematics tool, start by selecting the tip of the snake’s tail’s and stretching it out straight. Then, you can roll it in on itself.

If you select a piece of the snake you may notice that you can move it without actually directly pulling or pushing on it. You will also notice that the snake reacts differently depending on which part or which location you move it from. It’s also possible to push some of the pieces while the tip of the tail is still selected.

If you want to add a Master peg to your character, so that you can scale or reposition it, we recommended that you set an IK nail on the snake’s head first. This will fix the chain to the head and not the ground when you use the Inverse Kinematics tool.

You can add an IK nail by holding down the [Shift] key and clicking in the head’s IK pivot.

There you go! Enjoy animating your stories!