Although its possible to animate your characters just by rotating the joints directly, this can be a tricky way to animated, particularly when it comes to keeping the feet on the ground. Creating some custom controls for your character with Puppet2D is a very quick process, and really makes the job of animating more intuitive and easy.

IK Controls

Are controls you need for any of your characters limbs (IE arms or legs). This gives you a single end control which you can use to animated their limb. It will mean your feet will stay on the ground when you move its body.

To create an IK control, select the end of a three bone chain and click the “Create IK Control” Button. For example if you have leg which has bones such as thighBone>kneeBone>footBone. Select the footBone and click the button.

You can flip which way the knee (or elbow) faces by clicking the “flip” check box in the inspector. This can also be animated.

If you want you can have “stretchy limbs” by clicking the “Squash and Stretch” check box.

Parent & Orient Controls

A problem with animating bones directly is that they start from awkward rotations and positions. This means you cant quickly reset them by zeroing them. Puppet2D allows you to create controls that are easier to select and start out at zero position and rotation, so can be easily reset. Parent controls affect the position and rotation, orient controls affect only the rotation.

To create a parent control select a bone to control and click “Create Parent Control”

To create a orient control select a bone to control and click “Create Orient Control”

You can resize the controls in your scene by moving the slider to the desired scale and clicking the green circle icon.

In the drop down menu at the bottom of rigging setup you can choose which sorting layer to put the controls on. It is a good idea to have a “Control” Sorting Layer so you can keep it visually in front of the character and the Bones.