Parent Bone layer? For multiple trees blowing in the wind

[rogermate]

Is it possible to have a bone in a Parent Bone Layer control multiple bone skeletons in sub layers?

I see how to use one bone on a bone lawyer to control as many other skeletons on the same layer. You can name the control bone, then have
other bones follow the angle through bone constraints.

But what approach do you use when the constrained skeletons are themselves complex. In particular, I'm thinking about scenes where you would just duplicate an object multiple times and then animate all of them at once.

My first idea would be that each of these (duplicated as to skeleton, and perhaps slightly modified) objects would exist in their own Group or Bone layers. Otherwise, there might be naming problems with bones. But I can't see how to have a sub layer use Bone Constraints to track the motion of a bone that resides on a parent layer. Is this possible.

Is it better, or necessary, to put them all on the same layer?

Or, are there better techniques to have multiple skeletons track the same animated motion?

[heyvern]

Bones in sub bone layers can not "see" or be constrained by bones in the parent layer. Scripting is the only way to achieve this. I have been using a version of this technique in one of my bone rigs. Right now I only use it to control one bone from a sub layer to the parent but plan to expand it to control multiple bones based on name. I had created another set of scripts a long time ago but it was "klunky" and prone to problems. I have since found a better way to do this by limiting the control only to parent and sub layers.

Another thing to take note of regarding bone names; they can have the same name. Each bone in AS is not identified by its name except for you the user. The names are only for us to see what the bone is. You could have 100 bones all with the same name and AS can happily go along and work with each bone. It uses an internal "ID" number that has nothing to do with the name. If all of your bones have the same name and you constrain one bone to another it will still work as long as you know which bone is which .

-vern

[slowtiger]

Or just build your tree, rig it, make a copy of that setup and change the tree inside, repeat as often as you want to have different trees.

Then animate each tree. After that, multiply the top tree layers to your taste until you've got your forest.

[rogermate]

Or just build your tree, rig it, make a copy of that setup and change the tree inside, repeat as often as you want to have different trees.

Then animate each tree. After that, multiply the top tree layers to your taste until you've got your forest.

There's a neat tutorial in the manual showing grass built that used particles for grass.

Your approach makes sense for trees, and I could put a master bone in each layer to animate the swaying.

Thanks guys.