The Anime Studio library has a really cool robot with an impessive rig that I can not figure out.
Moving the body smart bone (circled below) does a body turn (as expected) but also moves the left and right arms either behind or in front of the body (see arrows below). How is this done?
I can not find any animated layer effects, nor can I find anything that appears to change a Z value of shapes. I also looked for Z values of points, but the points only show X and Y values.
Hi, I rigged that character and really don't know why it's doing that.
Just kidding, the Smart Bone you are showing us is controlling the animated layer order of the character. If you select the Bone layer and open the Body Turn action, you can see the layer order keyframe in frame 48. That's all the magic there.
The same happens with the Head turn (but in that case the layer order key is on the Head group)
To be able to animate the layer order, you must open the layer proprieties of the group/bone which contains the layers you want to animate, go to the Depth sort tab and check "Enable animated layer order"
Thank you for your help; it's always nice to talk to the Creator. I did not know that animated layer ordering could happen inside of an action controlled by a smart bone. After you told me this I was able to go inside the action and copy the keyframe 48 (where the action occurs) and move one of those keyframes to 46 and the other to 50. I then placed keyframes at 47 and 49 that have both arm layers moved in front of the body. This gives me a window of 3 frames where I can manipulate the smart bone and have both arms in front of the body, and still preserve the rest of the rig. I have illustrated this below for those who wish to do this in the future.
Additionally I should say that I was not aware that the layer animation inside an action does not show a keyframe on the main timeline.
Coffee on screen because of the unexpected religious reference.
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