Is it possible to make one bone layer for a characters walk?

[EDS]

This is with Moho, which I have had for a year but didnt really attempt to use because I was intimidated by that drawing interface.

I'm not naive and as always I take this shot by shot, and for this shot even the entire shot is not going to use Moho, and not even the entire character but anyways...

I worked with rigging the character last night and I immediately got a lot more comfortable with it, faster, than I ever imagined. It's beginning to make a lot more sense, how bones just help but you dont need to rely on them bending your artwork faithfully since you can just mess with the points every frame. It's almost the same principle I would with in Flash except easier in general posing and harder in adjusting points to make it look a little more like a drawing and not a bunch of peices.

So far I had set up every limb as its own bone layer so each bone layer has a linear heirarchy, but I realised how neat it is you can make bones influence across different layers, and i noticed you can have branching heirarchies, so I was wondering if I can just have all the different vector layers that already was working, and just do all the bones in one bone layer so it's less complicated and there are less timelines involved. If this would even work with a two arms, two legs, one head with a neck character with wrists and hands and feet, is plausible or does anyone with experience know any damning issues that would make this fail?

I dont want to tackle learning how to animate a face in Moho so I'm going to animate the walk and then render it with the unexpresseing head and without so I can use the one with the head as reference to stick on the animated head in Flash or something. Someone said here about not using one program for everything, and I didnt realise until then I can totally play everything I have to its strengths and my strengths even in the same shot simulaneously!

I noticed you can't put bone layers inside bone layers in Moho, is this possible in AS? That might make me want to spring for it.

[myles]

heirarchies, so I was wondering if I can just have all the different vector layers that already was working, and just do all the bones in one bone layer so it's less complicated and there are less timelines involved. If this would even work with a two arms, two legs, one head with a neck character with wrists and hands and feet, is plausible or does anyone with experience know any damning issues that would make this fail?

See Tutorial 3.4 (Moho or Anime Studio) - it shows one way of setting up a character with a single bone layer. No reason this shouldn't work if you are already working on different layers. The only real problem I can think of is when you have bones sitting on top of each other (e.g. crossed legs) - you just have to be careful which bone you are selecting.

I dont want to tackle learning how to animate a face in Moho so I'm going to animate the walk and then render it with the unexpresseing head and without so I can use the one with the head as reference to stick on the animated head in Flash or something. Someone said here about not using one program for everything, and I didnt realise until then I can totally play everything I have to its strengths and my strengths even in the same shot simulaneously!

As long as it works, although I'm not sure (by doing facial animation in Flash rather than Moho) that you are necessarily playing to the software's strengths though.

I noticed you can't put bone layers inside bone layers in Moho, is this possible in AS? That might make me want to spring for it.

This should work with Moho and AS. Make sure the about-to-become-a-parent bone layer is "open" (on the Layers panel, the little arrow between the eyes and the bone icon should be pointing down, not to the right).

Regards, Myles.

[EDS]

heirarchies, so I was wondering if I can just have all the different vector layers that already was working, and just do all the bones in one bone layer so it's less complicated and there are less timelines involved. If this would even work with a two arms, two legs, one head with a neck character with wrists and hands and feet, is plausible or does anyone with experience know any damning issues that would make this fail?

See Tutorial 3.4 (Moho or Anime Studio) - it shows one way of setting up a character with a single bone layer. No reason this shouldn't work if you are already working on different layers. The only real problem I can think of is when you have bones sitting on top of each other (e.g. crossed legs) - you just have to be careful which bone you are selecting.

I dont want to tackle learning how to animate a face in Moho so I'm going to animate the walk and then render it with the unexpresseing head and without so I can use the one with the head as reference to stick on the animated head in Flash or something. Someone said here about not using one program for everything, and I didnt realise until then I can totally play everything I have to its strengths and my strengths even in the same shot simulaneously!

As long as it works, although I'm not sure (by doing facial animation in Flash rather than Moho) that you are necessarily playing to the software's strengths though.

Yeah, its more of a combination of it's strengths and my strengths with all the software. As of now I could go faster in Flash and I want to get this little film done as soon as possible. I meant to say, I dont want to tackle learning the face for this project, I want to learn Moho as a tool completely, since it's a better tool than I realised 1 year ago.

I noticed you can't put bone layers inside bone layers in Moho, is this possible in AS? That might make me want to spring for it.

This should work with Moho and AS. Make sure the about-to-become-a-parent bone layer is "open" (on the Layers panel, the little arrow between the eyes and the bone icon should be pointing down, not to the right).

Regards, Myles.

You're right, thanks for that. That may actually render the whole one bone layer thing uncessary, and I wont need to rerig all of those limbs either.

[slowtiger]

I use both ways, one bone layer for everything, or several bone layers for several limbs. The second one gives me more visual control over the different timelines - this is the part I miss most in AS (I loved that in Animo).

The advantages of one over the other mostly depends on the complexity of your character. As Myles already said, all in one layer might give you some trouble in picking the right bone. It helps to offset the bone origins of, say, the legs a bit from each other, that way they are not able to completely cover each other, I just zoom in until I can grab the one I want.

(It would be a nice feature to have some sort of selection tool here. One possibiliy would be a context menu stepping through everything which stacks up at a certain plaxce, like in Photoshop. Another one would be a temporarily explosion of all bones from each other on the click of a button, select the one ypou need comfortably, then the bones reassemble like pulled with a string. Isn't that already potentially in there, because the "offset bone" does the same?)

[EDS]

I use both ways, one bone layer for everything, or several bone layers for several limbs. The second one gives me more visual control over the different timelines - this is the part I miss most in AS (I loved that in Animo).

The advantages of one over the other mostly depends on the complexity of your character. As Myles already said, all in one layer might give you some trouble in picking the right bone. It helps to offset the bone origins of, say, the legs a bit from each other, that way they are not able to completely cover each other, I just zoom in until I can grab the one I want.

(It would be a nice feature to have some sort of selection tool here. One possibiliy would be a context menu stepping through everything which stacks up at a certain plaxce, like in Photoshop. Another one would be a temporarily explosion of all bones from each other on the click of a button, select the one ypou need comfortably, then the bones reassemble like pulled with a string. Isn't that already potentially in there, because the "offset bone" does the same?)

I haven't come into any problems with selecting bones, and I dont even really know about what origin points do or how they can screw me up. I try not to change them once I start animating because in every other computer program that interpolates anything ever, if the pivoting point changes during an interpolation the whole thing goes absolutely crazy. Moho has me feeling especially nervous my character will just explode at the seams although nothing too horrible has happened yet.

Since I am doing a walk animation right now there's not a whole lot of interpolation, luckily, the bones just make it quicker to pose and then I can adjust the artwork. For less complicated things like a moving hold interpolation would be very useful but for now this is like an armature to a more fluid cut out, heh.

[j0llyr0ger]

It would be a nice feature to have some sort of selection tool here.

But there is! Of course, it requires you to have named your bones (which is wise anyway- for the important ones if not necessarily every one).

Watch the 'Tool Options Bar' just below the 'Menu Bar' next time you have a bone layer selected. You will see a button labelled 'Select Bone'. Click it and a list of all your named bones will be available. This makes it very easy to pick just the bone you want.

Naming bones to make them available in the 'Select Bone' button couldn't be easier. Simply select a bone and type the name you want it to have in the text field between the 'Select Bone' button and the 'Bone Constraints' button. You don't even have to be in frame zero- you can name the bone at any time.

[slowtiger]

Oops. Never used that, but of course you're right. Works nicely.

[Rasheed]

It is only a pity you cannot select multiple bones using this select-by-name method, to set the Selected Bone property of those bones in the timeline. Same applies to groups.