Help is Needed; ~Bone-Picture "Distortion"

[MistPower101]

Hi there, before I share my problem with you guys I'm just going to say that I'm new here, and I have looked around this forum at various topics; You guys are extremely helpful~

Now here's my problem: I do have a PNG picture imported into my Anime Studio 5, and I do have bones made. I also have the Picture Layer and Bone Layer combined (where you drag the Picture Layer on top of the Bone Layer, in case my term wasn't clear).

But whenever I go to Manipulate one of the Bones to make my character move, it does move that Bone sort of; But the rest of the image will rotate towards the Bone like it was a magnet. The image gets distorted~

Is there any way that I can fix this problem? It may just be because I have Anime Studio 5, but I need help. Now then, when I was looking about this forum, I did see several people suggest "Point Binding" or something like that, and whenever I go to a tutorial for how to do that, I do see how it can help me.

Except, all of those tutorials I find to only be useful for an image that you draw IN Anime Studio. It doesn't explain how to "Point Bind" an Imported Picture. When I change the Bone Layer type to "Region Binding" from being "Flexible Binding", that does help stop the "distortion" a little, but it doesn't get rid of the distortion completely.

Another solution I've read on this forum is to "cut apart" my character, and when I looked up a tutorial for that, it mentioned that Photoshop or Photoshop Elements is required/needed to "cut apart" my character into pieces. I do not have Photoshop of any kind, and nor do I wish to download it since I have so many Paint programs in my computer as it is.

I really really would like to NOT have to cut apart my character to solve this distortion problem, so please help me with this. With the "Point Binding"..... If I seriously do have to cut my character into pieces to fix this though, then an explanation on that would be helpful~

Thanks for the time~
~~Mist

[heyvern]

The best way to manipulate images with bones is using flexible bone binding in the bone preference tab. Trouble with flexible binding and bone manipulation of images "in one piece" is that the image of the character is all together and ALL the bones are close together and effect ALL of the image. If you have a bone to control the foot bending the foot also will effect the top of the head.. and the fingers... and the legs... etc etc.

You could try using "Region Binding" on the bone layer, however the results on image distortion are not as "smooth" when bending with bones.

By cutting the image apart into separate parts you can bind the entire image layer to a single bone preventing the distortion you describe. Or you could still use the bone distortion to "bend" image parts like arms and legs using bone offset. Bone offset allows you to move something like an arm further away from other bones so they don't have as much effect.

Another technique I've used is to use a whole bunch of extra bones on top of each other to have more control over a part of the image.


You don't need Photoshop to break the character images apart. Any paint program capable of saving out png files with an alpha channel can do this.

Point binding has nothing to do with image layers. Point binding is only used for vector layers.

-vern