Depth/hierarchy problem

[Kiiryu]

I have a bone for the head,
and it's parent is the neck bone,
However, the back of the hair needs to be behind the neck, yet parented to the head bone.
How can I make the depth of a layer farther back than something higher up in the hierarchy?

I've numbered the parts in terms of what the depth would need to be, with the lower numbers being farther back.


I've tried changing Z, but that doesn't seem to change the depth.

Edit: I've tried different depth sorting. Z effects depth when I do, but it messes up the depth of other layers for some reason. Setting the depth of the back of the hair to a negative number puts it behind the neck, and yet puts the neck in front of the face. (whereas before it isn't...)

[heyvern]

Not sure I understand the problem.

Is this an issue with bone binding and layer order? You can stack the layers anyway you want and bind the hair to any bone. You don't need to use z translation or depth sorting to move the hair back behind the neck/body.

Another solution would be to use "bone offset" with an additional bone for the back hair.
For example, have a hair bone that is a child of the head bone. Move this bone away from other bones and other layers so it won't effect them. Put the back hair layer or shape under this bone. Then use bone offset and move the hair bone back to the head.

[slowtiger]

You can have an unlimited number of layers attached to the same bone. Just put that back hair on its own layer under the neck layer and bind it to the same bone as the head layer.

[Kiiryu]

The problem is that the neck is a different bone than the head.
The head bone is in front of the neck bone

So, if the back hair is in the "head" bone, then it's in front of the neck bone. I can't move the back-hair layer behind the neck, because that would mean taking it out of the "head" bone group.

I don't want to have them all on the same layer and seperated, because for whatever reason, if you use flexible binding then images need to be insanely far apart, which is frustrating to manage.

[Kiiryu]

Geh, I need to take another look at this. I think I need to learn more about binding layers.

[heyvern]

Okay I am guessing here on how you have this set up.

To have the back hair and head work with the same bone....

Create a head bone as a child of the neck bone in the body bone layer. Basically the entire rig would be in the body layer. No head or neck bone should be in the head layer. Actually the head layer doesn't even need to be a bone layer at all with nested bones. The head layer can simply be a group layer.

Bind the head layer to the head bone. Then put the back hair layer in the body layer behind all the layers. Bind the back hair to the same head bone in the body that the head group layer is bound to.

Any rotations of the head bone in the body will rotate the head and hair together as if they were in the same layer.

For the image bone manipulation issue, you can split up the images into different parts (arms, legs, body, etc) and then select just the bones you want to influence each image layer with the "Use Selected Bones For Flexi-Binding" under the bone menu. This should help with the bone warping of images.

[Kiiryu]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Indeed the issue was that I wasn't putting everything in the same bone group. The issue now is binding.

The last thing I'm confused about, is binding a single layer (a raster image) to multiple bones. For instance, the torso is a single image, but I want it bound to two bones, and with flexible binding.

[Kiiryu]

Hmmm.

When you use "use selected bones for flexi binding", nothing happens. If I'm doing say, an arm, what bone should the image be bound to?

If I bind an image of an arm to the shoulder, and then select all the arm bones and click flexi binding, it's only effected by the shoulder.

EDIT: Ah, I need to go into the images options and select "warp using bones"