Moho Forum

I'm doing an animation of a character pulling a tag off a pillow. My problem is: I want his pointer finger over the tag, and his thumber under the tag. I assume I need to make the pointer finger on a seperate layer that's above everything else, and have the tag above the thumb and hand. My issue is, how do I still keep the finger, hand, arm, and the tag (once it's pulled off and needs to move along with the hand) all smoothly animating together? If I try and use bones, won't the tag be in the way and get animated along with the hand and arm, since it's caught inbetween the pointer finger and hand?

Does this question even make sense?

Thanks for any help!

Does AS7 have the meshinstance script?
It should work, the AS6 scripts work in 7 dont they?
Have the charcetr bottom layer, then tag, then instance of character layer on top, with only relevant bits (the thumb) visible.
Dun

I'm afraid I don't know much about scripts yet, so maybe I'm trying to do too much at once?

And I should say I'm using Anime Studio Debut 7. I'm not sure if Debut uses scripts.

Duh. I just realized I could bind points, and leave out the tag, right?

Just have your character and the prop all in the same bone layer. Create a bone rig for the character, and bind the layers to it in the way you like. Have the finger layer be separate, but bound to its bone as well.

Create another bone in that bone layer, but at root level (= no other bone is highlighted when you create this). Bind the prop layer (a group or bone layer or whatever) to it via layer binding. You could set the constraints of this bone to 0, so it will not move accidentially.

slowtiger wrote:Just have your character and the prop all in the same bone layer. Create a bone rig for the character, and bind the layers to it in the way you like. Have the finger layer be separate, but bound to its bone as well.

Create another bone in that bone layer, but at root level (= no other bone is highlighted when you create this). Bind the prop layer (a group or bone layer or whatever) to it via layer binding. You could set the constraints of this bone to 0, so it will not move accidentially.

That helps a lot! I'll try it tonight!

This leads me to another question: I don't want the tag to move until the fingers touch it. At that point, I want the tag to move along with the fingers when they pull it off the pillow. Can I bind the tag to the same bone as the fingers later on down the timeline?

I kind of did something like this when I had a character pick up a piece of chalk. What I did was make a duplicate of the chalk layer and have it as an extension of the hand with its own bone and made it invisible and right when the character picked it up I invisible the chalk layer that was not in the bone layer and visible the chalk that's in the bone layer. You might have to do some layer translations to match them up perfect as both papers overlap each other but it will be invisible and wont notice the small adjustments.

No, you shouldn't bind the tag to the same bone as the finger. But it's quite easy to make them both move te same speed. After all it's just a couple of frames. Have the start and stop keys of both movements in the same frames, and use the same interpolation - AS cares for the rest.

slowtiger wrote:No, you shouldn't bind the tag to the same bone as the finger. But it's quite easy to make them both move te same speed. After all it's just a couple of frames. Have the start and stop keys of both movements in the same frames, and use the same interpolation - AS cares for the rest.

Yes, forget my way, It wont work for this. use slowtigers...

I think this is the way slowtiger explained it. Way easier than the way I have been doing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq-u0s5G_o