So I'm creating and rigging an ant for a contest. I had it almost fully rigged and ready to go, everything looked fine in frame 0. Then when starting to animate down the timeline, I noticed that three of the legs as they would move started manipulating the gradient colors in the shapes of the body. If you want to look at it, here's the dropbox link for the .anme file.
I made random movements of the legs to illustrate the problem. If you notice frames 1-31 really highlight what's wrong. It seems to be the legs that start with bones B10,B14, and B26. Frames 32-65 are meant to illustrate that the other legs and body bones are not having the same effects.
Any ideas? I've never come across this issue before.
Thanks,
-Casey
Looking at how you rigged and setup the ant, the body being effected by leg bones are using "point binding". If you used layer binding for each part on a separate layer the leg bones won't effect the gradient of the body.
Since that ant body is simply "static" shapes bound to bones, it can easily be split into 3 separate layers. Then just bind each LAYER to the appropriate bone.
The reason this works is that the whole layer is moving around. When binding points, gradient shape fills aren't "bound" to the points. They are always "free moving" by the bones.
Thanks Heyvern, the solution worked perfectly. It makes good sense, I can't believe I didn't think to try it...sometimes I get so caught up in figuring out what in the world is wrong I forget to think of an alternate solution. Thanks for helping me understand what was wrong, otherwise I'm sure I'd run into this same problem again at some point.
-Casey
