Take a hat off?

[MiaNYLA]

How would you have a character remove his hat?

I created a character and gave him arms and filled in the bones. I created a hat in another layer (I am using an image as the face and need to have the hat over the face so I could not create the hat in the same layer as his body or his body would be over the face too).

Halfway through the scene I want him to remove his hat. I move his hand up to his head with the bones. Then I move the hand down again and try and move the hat layer with it. But try as I may, the hat and hand coming down do not follow the same path. I cannot bind the hand bone to the hat because that can only be done in frame 0 and if I do that in frame 0, the hat will move when I move the hand up to the hat. What am I missing?

[Darramouss]

I would suggest switches.

Have a switch layer for the arm. One switch has an arm with no hat, the other has a hat. Start with the no hat switch. When the arm moves up to the head you turn the visibility of the layer that contains the hat on the head off and switch over to the arm+ hat layer. This way your hat is attached to the arm and will follow it wherever you want it to go following the same path.

Just a suggestion...

[MiaNYLA]

Well, of course, shortly after posting this I discovered one solution. I had been translating the hat's layer and I switched to translating the points. It's easier that way. I'm still curious to see if there's a simpler solution as this entails many, many trips to the timeline to keep them aligned.

But now another problem has popped up. He passes the hat to another person. Though I set that person's hand to move at a specific frame, it seems to be starting before that. Same thing when I move the entire skeleton. If I set it to move at, say frame 12, it starts to head towards that position beforehand. What's up with that?

[MiaNYLA]

Thanks for your suggestion. I didn't see it before my second post. Any clue to what I'm doing wrong that's causing the second problem?

[Darramouss]

If you're passing an object from one character to another I would use switches also. There may be more efficient methods but I find that switches tend to work as the object is intrinsically tied to whatever is moving it.

With your second problem, it sound like AS Pro is moving the hat from the last recognised keyframe, (the one before you want to move the hat), to the one you've inserted. Solution for this is to select frame 12, (put the little red line at frame 12, {does that red line have a proper name?}), click on the hat's previous keyframe, press copy and then paste to insert a new keyframe at frame 12.

[slowtiger]

I had the same problem earlier this year. My solution was to duplicate the hat, attach one of it to the head bone, the other to the hand bone, and switch visibility on and off where necessary. This is my standard procedure for every item which is carried around and put down in the same scene.