Adding noise to an animation with Puppetshop

Your muscles constantly work to keep your body in balance. We will try to emulate this by adding noise to our animations. It's an easy way to make your animations feel more natural, similar to adding noise to a clean rendering which yields a more pleasing, photography-like result. Good controllers or objects for adding noise are the puppet root, head, chest and hands.

How to add noise to an animation

1. Create a new animation layer for your noise
2. Select the bone you want to add noise to (e.g. the puppet root)
3. Open the Puppetshop trackview
   
   
4. Select the track you want to convert to a noise track, e.g. the X Position track (a)
5. Got to the menu Controller => Assign... (b)
6. Select the Noise Float (c) controller in the popup to replace the original Bezier Float controller
   
   

How to transfer the generated noise onto other animations

1. Select the Noise Layer of your animation
2. Select another animation you want to apply the noise to
3. Go to Puppetshop's Layer advanced rollout
4. Go to Duplicate Layer From and chose the animation with the noise in it from the dropdown
5. Shift click on the Add button to copy the layer instead of instancing it
6. Check the animation and see if it still loops seamlessly
7. If not, create a new layer and activate Auto Key Mode
8. Copy the starting pose to the end of your frame range