How to Add More Drawing Substitutions to an Existing Template?

Retired Products Animate Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hello, I can’t seem to find the answer to this question. I created a character, rigged it, made a template, started a new scene, dragged the template into the scene and started animating. So far, so good. But now after completing a run cycle, I realize that I would like to have my character’s mouth hanging open while it runs. The only problem is that I didn’t create a mouth like that beforehand.

So, I right clicked on the template and entered “Edit Template” mode. I drew the mouth I needed on the next available frame of the mouth layer, saved, and went back to my scene. This is where I need help: the new mouth that I drew doesn’t show up in the drawing substitutions window. I know it’s there, because if I re-drag the newly saved version of the template into my scene, the new mouth drawing is available to choose from - but then of course I’d have to do the running animation all over again! Why did the number of drawing substitutions on the mouth layer not update after I edited and saved the template I used in my running animation?

It should be possible to do what I am explaining, right? Otherwise, an animator would have to be able to see the future and know exactly how many drawing substitutions for each body part he or she will need for an entire scene before starting to animate anything at all. I would greatly appreciate any information on what I’m doing wrong here…

2

You can add the new mouth to the current project and the drag the characters pegs with all his parts to the library and save as a new template.

3

I’m not exactly sure how what you’re suggesting is efficient. Right now it may just be one mouth, but what if you had a scene where a character was dancing, and then you decided to make them sing as well, you’d need a whole bunch of new mouth and facial expressions. How would you manage doing something like that? And what if you used that character in a bunch of other scenes as well, and you’d like to access the new drawings in those other scenes, too?

Is there no way to somehow link all instances of a template being used across different scenes to the one in the library? I kinda thought that was the point of making templates… so that they update automatically when changes are made or new drawings are added to the “master”?

4

I totally agree with this ahhaha 2 years later.

But indeed, that’s how puppets work in blender. You link characters to a scene and if you want to edit it, you can like, have an editable versin in situ, but all changes will reflect on the master. Here on toonboom, it looks like you would have to have many master versions, each with a different drawing.