Group Rigging Woes

AnnaMayBelle · Post by **AnnaMayBelle** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:16 pm

Hi! I'm a noob to Anime Studio Pro and a long-time Photoshop user. As a result, when I drew my character's head, my Photoshop instincts kicked in and I drew individual pieces of the character's head (face, bangs left, bangs right, scalp, etc) each on their own layers and stuck them in a Group titled Head. Well, now that I'm trying to rig this sucker for animation, I've faced an issue... I don't see any way to assign the points of a group to a bone. If this isn't doable, then is there any way to merge Vector layers together onto a single Vector layer, similar to Photoshop's Merge Layers?

Any help would be much appreciated.

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:46 pm

For a head you don't need to worry about assigning points -- just use Region Binding on your bone layer, drag that group under it, and put your head bone there. Then by adjusting the bone weight you can make sure it will hit everything (actually, by default anything close to that bone will be assigned to it whether the weight is there or not -- however if you don't move the head away from the neck, for example, you will need to adjust the neck weight so it doesn't affect the head parts).

I always create separate layers for my head parts -- hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, etc -- and group them as a "head" layer I can move around. Boning is no issue at all (although any switch layers I have, such as eyes, need to be assigned to that head bone separately -- this ain't any big deal, though).

AnnaMayBelle · Post by **AnnaMayBelle** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:12 pm

Thank you very much! Now off I go to figure out how to attach my arms and legs to the torso, I think that shouldn't be too hard. Hopefully I'll be posting my Nowaki character running on all fours when she's done.