onion skinning acting oddly...

[sarhound]

Hi,

I activated onion skinning for a frame so I could nail the tail of my fish in one place. In the next frame, I'm trying to use some point animation to put the tail back to the position of the onionskin, but when I move the tail points, the onionskin outlines are moving, as well.

Is the onionskin frame dependent on the orginal outline of the object not being modified, or does it take a "snapshot" of the outline of the object and just kind of "paste" it there?

I can probably make a workaround by pasting a layer of the fish body at the position where I want the tail to stay, then modifying the body as it needs to distort.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Kim Stephens

[7feet]

It's generally relative to what you are doing, if the last keyframe for the type of animation you are doing (point, layer, etc.) is back before the frame that you have onionskinned. In this case, if you want the onionskin nailed at a particular frame, just add a keyframe in the Point Motion channel at the frame you want onionskinned. That'll keep it from moving around when you change things on the frame you are animating. You can always delete that keyframe when you're done.

[Toontoonz]

I activated onion skinning for a frame so I could nail the tail of my fish in one place. In the next frame, I'm trying to use some point animation the tail back to the position of the onionskin, but when I move the tail points, the onionskin outlines are moving, as well.

Just a thought that does not have anything to do with onionskinning, but rather that you are trying to put the tail back to the position of the onionskinned version of the tail....
Have you tried making a keyframe in the frame you are currently onionskinning, then copy that keyframe and paste it in the new place in the timeline you want it to be? That way you get an exact copy of the the tail back to the position of the onionskin and can further tweak as you like.

[sarhound]

Yeah, I've tried that, but I'm working between a layer animation and point animation to get the position I want, and that seems to be giving my Moho object some hiccups, so something has to give. It's probably going to be easier for me to hand draw the inbetweens that I want to use, since I want to turn his head to the camera at the same time. Since I have to draw that, I might as well draw the whole thing.

I'll try the keyframing for the onionskinning, though. Sounds like it might fix a few problems that will crop up in the rest of the animation.

Kim

[Lost Marble]

Brian accurately described what's happening. If you have a keyframe at 0, a keyframe at 10, and an onion skin frame at 5, then if you modify the value at frame 10, the onion skin will (and should be expected to) change.

Since there's no keyframe at 5, frame 5 is determined by interpolating between 0 and 10. So if you change either frame 0 or frame 10, the onion skin frame at 5 will reflect this change.

In other words, frame 5 is dependent on frames 0 and 10. If you change 0 or 10, then 5 will change as well, onion skin or not.

This is exactly what should happen, and is not a bug.

[norco]

Could onion skin become an optional toolbar, because it doesn`t always simce to be usefull, in the contrary (just an Hide/Unhide button in the left side of it would be very usefull)

[Rhoel]

Could onion skin become an optional toolbar, because it doesn`t always simce to be usefull, in the contrary (just an Hide/Unhide button in the left side of it would be very usefull)

I have found onion skining very useful, especilaly when used in the relative frames mode - you can see very quickly if an inbetween is working or not - if it striaght lines, you know you have to add a key and manually help moho find the right path.

Rhoel