Changing layer position at a certain point of timeline

Retired Products Toon Boom Studio General Discussion
1

Hello.
The layer position always stays the same, is there any way at certain point of animation bring an object to back/front of another object and attach it to a keyframe? For example, spacecraft is flying around the earth. At one moment spacecraft is in front of earth, but I would need to animate a transition when its moving behind the earth, but spacecraft layer stays on the top of earth, so I can’t do it . While animating bones and more complex shapes like characters I encounter such a problem quite often . There should be some easy way of switching back/front positions of same object while animating.Hope you understood the problem. Thank you !

2

Hey slick1,

Drawing layers can be brought to the back/front by setting their z-depth positions. Here are several demos/tutorials that should help:

General z-depth demo: https://youtu.be/nn7OxvKMKN8
General z-depth demo (by Tony Teach): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faysobXlFYU
Animating the Moon orbiting Earth (by Tony Teach): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxxk9w1miJI

All the best!

3

Thank you, you helped a lot !

I have another question, in order to animate character head turn , I place a lot of bones around the head outlines and then shape the lines into wanted form, but the problem is that I cant lock the bones into circle, I mean one bone is not being connected to anything and while shaping the object, this bone leaves unwanted distortions. Maybe thats the wrong way in general to animate turnaround, but its working quite good except that single bone, thats not locking the line. could you give me and advice how to lock the bones into circle or maybe an easier way to animate turnaround. Appreciate !

4

Regarding head turns, I’m currently favoring using basic transforms (scaling, rotation, skews) on simple shapes to create the illusion of a rotation. Here’s what I mean:

  1. A super-basic head-turn exercise: https://youtu.be/4cFry_bi-9w
  2. An example of where I’m going with the idea: https://youtu.be/UzTtsHytATo

Do these work for your purposes? FYI, I’m trying to stick with the basic tools as much as possible (to keep things simple for me) before resorting to more advanced features. Hope this helps.