This is a “noob” question and I was hoping someone could answer it for me.
- I created a short walking cycle template of a cutout I have made. I drag it into the (timeline?) and then I select it and do the: Element – Translate – Flip Horizontal, the template does flip but only for the 1st frame. Do I have to flip the template for every animated frame or is there a trick to this?
- How can I change the pivot point of where I want the horizontal/vertical translation to take place, for some reason it seems to be in the very middle of the stage all the time.
I suspect that you had the scene operations transform tool selected when you used the Element>transform>flip horizontal command. If so you made that transform as a keyed frame and therefore as soon as you moved to the next keyed frame your character was keyed to face the opposite direction. If you had used the scene operations select tool instead of the transform tool then your horizontal flip would not have been key framed but instead would have been applied globally to the elements in your hierarchy which I believe was what you were trying to do in your example.
There are three scene planning operations tools that can be used to change pivot points. They are the rotation, skew, and scale tools. The rotation and skew tools are use to set the position of the rotational pivot point while the scale tool is used to set the scaling pivot point. But be careful about changing pivot points with these tools after you have been setting keyframes because these changes are global and can mess up your previously set rotations etc. It is always best to set the pivot points before you start keyframing motions. If you need to use a temporary change in a pivot point use the transform tool and change its pivot point because that pivot point is only changed while the tool is selected and active and is designed to let you change the pivot point location without effecting other frames. Please keep asking questions as you have them because these are very good questions and many reader will learn from them as well. -JK
Thanks a lot JK, I did use the transform tool instead of the scenes operation one. I didn’t know about the global change, I guess I should be more careful. Thanks again. ;D
Don’t be too hard on yourself, you’er just starting out and obviously making great progress just based on the quality of your questions so stay at it and we all will help out when ever we can. -JK