Hi, I have been a Flash animator for years, and wanted to try out Animate. I’m familiar with Toon Boom Studio and Digital Pro, but I’m having a huge problem with Animate.
You see, I’m trying to set up a puppet for animation, and I try to set up a pivot point to the head peg. So I click the pivot tool, and set the pivot point to the neck. I go and try to use the animation tools, and it seems like the tool completely ignored the fact that I set it to the neck. This makes the IK tool completely useless.
This only happens with pegs. Drawing elements are just fine. Does the tool not work with pegs?
When you work with pegs and you want to use IK, the setup would be a little bit different. You need to be able to have the parent peg inherit the drawing pivot that you set on the drawing, then you would exclude the drawing from IK and just animate with the pegs. This is an advanced feature, however, and is only available through Animate Pro.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Oh, I was using Animate, and not Animate Pro. Let me download that, and see how it works.
If you’re going to give it a try on Animate Pro, then what you need to do is double-click on the drawing layer that’s attached to the peg, then go to the Drawing tab, and from the dropdown list for the pivot select “Use Embedded Pivot on Parent Peg”. Then when you use the IK tool, select the drawing and exclude it from IK, then when you select the peg you should be able to use the IK just fine.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Well, I kinda have a long story, but I’m still having the IK problem.
You see, I finally decided to download Animate Pro to test the lip sync. I wanted to test this because I want to make the jump from Flash (which is giving me some serious issues) to Toon Boom Studio (I’m assuming the whole Toon Boom family uses the same lip sync engine).
I made a test video (which didn’t turn out too great, since I needed to fix some things, but couldn’t find the cel swapper thing), and tried what you said. Before I did, I assigned the pivots to the cells and they stayed!
So I tried what you said, and the IK tool STILL didn’t work. The IK “bones” were all over the place. 
Okay, so just to clarify - you have something like the following structure, right?
—[ Parent (Master) Peg
----[ Child Peg
----[ Child Drawing layer
----[ Child Peg
----[ Child Drawing layer
----[ Grandchild Peg
----[ Grandchild Drawing Layer
Now, for each Drawing layer, you assign your pivot using the pivot tool. Then, you double-click on the drawing layer, go to the Drawing tab, under the Use Embedded Pivots section there is a dropdown list - select Apply Embedded Pivot on Parent Peg.
Now you have all your pivots set up. You go to use the IK tool. Select each Drawing Layer, and in the IK tool’s Tool Properties window, select “Exclude from IK”. Now, when you use the IK tool, it should use the peg instead of the drawing.
Now when you select the Child Peg layer, and select the IK tool, you should have a bone structure similar to what you would have if you had no pegs. Only, you will have an extra pivot point for the Master peg that will simply be defined as the centre of the object. Since this master peg does not have a drawing, you can’t set the pivot for it. Instead what you should do is when you’re using the IK tool, shift-click the pivot for the Child peg, and that will nail it in place, and you should be able to work just fine from here on out.
If this doesn’t work for you, could you send me a screenshot showing what your IK looks like? Select the IK tool, and select your parent peg, and that should show the bone structure. Upload your screenshot to a free site like photobucket and paste the url here.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support