Possible: kind of "Masterbone" controls bones in character?

[lichtsammler]

Hi.
Maybe it's a litte difficult to describe ...
Example: a character with different views - profile right, side right, frontal, side left, profile left - all realised in a switchlayer.
Each view has two or three views of the head (switchlayer).
Each head has a mouth which is animated by a dial-bone. Turning the bone produces different mouths.

A dialog is animated with one of these dial-bones. Then I copy this bone and replace all the other dial-bones with this animated one. Result: all the mouths of the different views are doing the same mouth movement.

It works, but it would be great to have one master-bone in the parent layer which acts as a dial for all the mouths.

Got it?

Possible?

Thanks in advance.

[Víctor Paredes]

I'm not sure if I understood, but in 9.5 you can use Smart bones to control bones inside other child bone layers*. I had to use that once to control a very complex rig made of several images inside switches.

* And child layer's smart bones can control grandchild layer's bones. Just be sure to put different names to each bone to avoid conflicts.

[RubyD]

I'm in a similar situation with a rig I'm currently working on. It'd be great if Anime Studio would support the ability to animate smart (dial) bones with other smart (dial) bones, as this would be the ideal solution. Maybe I'm mistaken and Anime Studio has the ability to do such thing and I just haven't found a way to get it working

I sort of got around this by creating (smart bone) actions for the master dial bone control. Each action is set to display the appropriate mouth position in all views. It does get extremely messy as it can easily double the amount of bones and it becomes a bit of a headache if you want to make any future edits or adjustments, especially if your character is a complex one.

I'm curious to see what suggestions/solutions those with more experience post