smart bone cases

[spar9zedou]

Hello all.

this is my first post in the forum. The anime studio 8 manual is very useful, but when it gets to new features, I haven't found the manual for version 9 and so I always come here.

By the way, if any of you know of good tutorials that ARE NOT video, i'd love to get the link. It's so much faster to follow a text tutorial with screen grabs than going through a long winded video... But thanks to the tutorial makers anyhow.


To my question.

1. First i'd like a definite answer on the following. Inside my bone layer, can the following elements be affected by smart bones:

- group layers and their content
- Bone layers and their children

I am working on a project about arthritis and just vector drew a knee joint which must be seen deteriorating.

So I'll use a smart bone to affect the current shapes as well a layer showing deterioration.
Here is my technique which as far as I can tell is not explained anywhere but in video tutorial. Hopefully, other newbies can use my post to see a simple step by step and the pros can correct me if I'm wrong.

- Create bone layer
- Put layers in bone layer
- Create a bone (somewhere on the edge of my frame so it's not in the way)
- Decrease bone influence (so it doesn't affect points in the way)
- Create a smart bone action and give it the same name as the bone
- in the smart bone action timeline, put the cursor at x frame and rotate the bone to its desired end position using the rotation tool (and not the manipulate tool)
- still at frame x, change attributes of the desired layers to what the last frame of the animation must look like.
- put the cursor in between frame 0 and frame x to fine tune layers if necessary
- double click on mainline
- Put the cursor at any frame and use the rotation tool to test the smart bone (then ctrl+z to take off the test keyframe).


I hope that makes sense and I didn't forget a crucial step.


Once I have an animation of my knee joint deteriorating, i'd like to give it some 3d rotation feel so i'm thinking of creating another smart bone for a let's say 100 degree turn (like a head turn, except it's a knee joint)
I'd like this turn to be usable also on my plain healthy joint.

sooooo. Would it work if I:

create a smart bone just for the turn and apply it to my object as it is (without deterioration).

then for my mainline, tweak both my deterioration bone and turn bone so that it turns while deteriorating.

Any thoughts?


I tried making the turn bone last night and concluded smart bones don't affect the X Y rotation tool (which seem to be the best starting point for a "3d" turn"). I think it's supposed to be fixed in v9.2 so i'm downloading now but even then, I'm not sure what is the best way to go about it:

- putting all layers in a group within the bone layer and having the smart bone layer affect the X Y rotation of the group

or

- Having the bone layer affect its own x y rotation (since it contains all layers)



Thanks a lot