3)Making 2D puppet with Toonboom harmony Essentials

 

To make a 2D puppet, we need to plan out the character.

When you work on a character sketch, make sure which parts of the body you want to animate.

for example, 

if you want to animate your character's hair, you MUST SEPARATE hair into several pieces and head in the different drawing layers.

If you want to animate fingers, you  MUST SEPARATE each finger from the palm layer.

I'm going to animate the hat, eyes, each arm, hands, and legs in my example.

therefore, I need to have separate pieces of 

Hat, head, eyes, torso, left arm, right arm, left hand, right hand, left leg, and right leg.

In all separated drawing layers.

It's the same as making an actual puppet in real life, 

we will give smooth joints later on for our puppet, 

but you need to have separate body parts that can be moved individually.

Make sure you name your layers properly for your convenience,

Make sure that you make the body parts overwrapped. 

See the image above.

 The whiter parts of the body are the parts that are overwrapped.

If you don't overwrap the body, you can't make smooth animation nor separate movements.

Now we are going to extend the frames of drawing layers.

Hold the shift key and click all the drawing layers.

Right-click and click extend exposure.

enter the amount of frame you want to extend,

After you extend the frames,

now you need to make the hierarchy of drawing layers (Parenting)

Drag child layers (parts that belong to some other big parts) to the parent layer.

For example, if you have eyes, nose, mouse layers; they belong to the head layer.

so drag them under the head layer.

nose, eyes mouth are the child layer, and the head layer is the parent layer.

click the name of child layer (no double click!)

drag on the name of the parent layer, and drop it,

you need to make the layers setting look like above

!!!!Note!!!

since you parented some layers, you would probably have a character that looks like above: 

layer order issues, some layers supposed to be on the top go under certain layers.

Its' totally fine.

We will fix it later, so you don't have to worry about this at all.

So do not change the order of your layers!

It would be much convenient to parent one layer for every part again.

I prefer to put everything under the torso.

So you can still keep the parenting of layers ( left hand under the left arm)

you can parent again for one big piece( left arm and something else under torso)

If you organized correctly,

 you will see the layer you click turns into pink and other sub-layers turn yellow.

Now, we are going to change the layers' orders.

go window( or click + button next to the drawing and camera view)

and click Top

Now you will get the new Top view window that looks like the above.

before the change, anything Click the top button I marked- Maintain size tool

Also, 

turn off the animate

have to be a yellow stick figure to RED!

In the top view, you will see the pink arrow when you click the layer.

If you push the pick arrow backward, the drawing layer you select goes backward from the camera; if you push them forward, the drawing layer would be close to the camera.

So using the top view, you can change the order of the drawing view for visual.

If you are done with puppet drawing,
 now we just need to add  Joints for the puppet!

Click the  hammer button on the top (Rigging tool)

if you can't find the hammer tool

go window> Tool Bar> Deformation 

After clicking the rigging tool,( the hammer)

now you just have to click the joints of each layer.

Make sure that you are creating the joint on the layer you select.

To create a joint on the arm, for example,

 you have to click the arm and go click hammer and mark the joint on the arm.

Above red dots are the joint I'll click

make sure the end of the joint is slightly outside of the drawing layer.

You will get the looks like this.

Now, you just have to repeat the same things for each layer.

If you are done with adding joints for the body,

now we need to turn the animate back,

Click the red stick figure and turn that into a yellow running stick figure.

Now by adding the keyframes and move around the joint, you can make puppet animation.

To move your joints, click the blue box button under the stick figure( transform tool)

if the joints turn in to light green, that means it's activated.