Cloning Element Hierarchies

Retired Products Toon Boom Studio Support and Troubleshooting
1

I want to create a group of characters, all dancing in sync. I began by building one character and animating the dance steps. Now, I want to clone that character a dozen times and position the clones in a group.

When I right-click on the dancer’s root parent element and select “Clone Element”, though, it only clones that root element, but not any of its child elements. I have to go through each element in the hierarchy, clone it, and then rebuild the hierarchy with all the cloned elements. Now I have a second character repeating the dance, which I can reposition. But, that was a pretty complicated set of steps for just cloning one character. Then, I have to do it 11 more times.

Is there an easier way to do this?

2

If your character is simple enough, you can make a template of it and add a peg to displace every instance of it you bring into the project. It’s either this or clone every part manually and place it in the correct position using the original as a reference (this is better use of memory than making instances of a template but takes more work)

This is easier to do in Animate Pro or Harmony where there are methods to avoid needing to duplicate or clone the character.

3

Thanks for this!