Studying Cyber Bat Twins - Help?

[SuperSGL]

I'm so confused took me awhile to realize the bat wings had an extra flap during the animation. If I'm not mistaken this is just point animation but genius in it's construction to give it the front and back looks.(very impressive, cool)
*But around frame 95 - Jose jumps off the bat for a moment and back down. I can't figure out which bone is controlling this action. I cant seem to move the feet at all other then the independent angle bone. It wont even let me select the leg bones (with the Manipulate bone tool) Typing this I realized it was the transform bone tool that was the jumper and the key frames also helped me figured it out. I'll leave this for beginners (and people like me who keep forgetting how things work)

And finally checking out the eyes - What is the difference between Add to Mask & +Clear the mask and add this layer to it? I have my own eye rig and I don't see any changes or anything different happening when I use one or the other. Masks are and can be rather tricky in there set up I even set up a file with different colored rectangles in a mask just to change all the different types even seeing it I can't grasp real world use for some of these. ???

[synthsin75]

The main trick with the wings is animated shape order, to get the two sides.
The jump looks like it was animated manually. The easiest way is to select the character's root bone and both foot target bones and translate all three together.

Clear the mask just means that lower mask operations won't propagate any higher than that layer. It can be used to create pseudo masking groups within a single group. Victor seems to have used this so he could have both eyes in the same group not effect each other.

[SuperSGL]

Thanks synthsin75! I still use masks just the way they tell me to and I see it work, still have hard time grasping a lot of there functionality. But your explanation has helped me understand this better.