I’m trying to follow this tutorial and do this…http://www.tallgrassradio.com/toonboom/2008/01/animating-cut-out-characters-part-1.html
http://www.connectedconcepts.net/photos/ctb1/ctb011608017.gif
and i can’t rotate the arm, i can’t get it to look like that.
my image
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8369/screenshot2yw6.jpg
I know I’m not articulating very well but I’m hoping my pictures will speak for themselves.
I can’t see anything obviously wrong in your picture, you have the upper arm selected and you are using the scene transform tool.
Have you tried to mouse over either the rotation arm or one of the four outside corners of the transform bounding box? You should see a curved arrow icon when you mouse over one of those spots. Once the curved arrow icon is showing, you click and hold the left mouse button and drag the rotation arm counter clockwise and the arm will rotate. If you look closely in the upper picture, the one you copied from my tutorial, you can see the curved arrow icon next to the rotation arm handle. You are doing everything right up to the actual rotating. If what I have written here doesn’t get you going let me know and I’ll try to walk you through it, but based on your picture you seem to be doing everything correctly so far. -JK
Ya that’s what I was thinking, I went through your tutorial twice so I couldn’t figure out how what I was doing was different.
I don’t get it I’ve even tried the rotation tool just to see, and nothing, it won’t budge. It almost feels like it’s locked, I don’t know if that’s actually a feature or not so i’m not sure.
I’m on leopard if that makes a difference.
I just opened der der and went straight to his right arm and chose the transform tool and nothing, still won’t move.
thanks for your reply jk, I hope I can get this working
I can’t speak to this as I don’t have OSX 10.5 on my Mac. Considering the other issues that have arisen with compatibility, I wouldn’t rule it out. Are you using a Wacom tablet? Are you using a mouse or a pen?
I have never found any feature of TBS that would lock the transform tool from being able to set keyframes so this is not a lock inside the software to the best of my knowledge.
Let’s try an experiment.
Create a new element, draw a random shape using the brush tool and then using the drawing select tool select the shape you just drew and try to rotate it while in drawing view.
If you can rotate it in drawing view with the select tool, then switch to camera view and using the scene transform tool select the shape and try to rotate it.
If you can’t rotate an object in drawing view with the select tool ect, then I have to believe that you are experiencing a system specific problem which may be caused by your OS or your mouse or your tablet or something and it may be a generic issue but it also could be a set up issue on your specific system. Keep me posted and I’ll try to help. -JK
I thought I had read one post of someone saying about a problem he thought was leopard related but I wasn’t sure.
I’m using a wacom tablet yes, using the mouse to rotate i…
alright, well i drew the element, and it wouldn’t rotate with my wacom mouse, so i used the trackpad…and it rotates.
so I went to the file i had from your tutorial, and the boys arm rotates just fine with the mbp’s track pad. so bingo! i feel a little silly, but that never came to mind.
thank you for helping me.
edit
nevermind what was in this post
what’s the best way to go about taking like the little boy character and replacing the parts with parts from my own drawing?
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1671/lacrosseboyfallsapartef3.png
OK, the Wacom mouse under OSX 10.5 is a known problem that still exists per a post made by Ugo in the Leopard compatibility thread at the top of this forum section. So at least you can move forward, and just don’t use the Wacom mouse until they get that resolved.
As to the second question. As much as I’d like to sit here all night writing an explanation, not really, you will have to wait until I get to that phase of animating cut outs in the blog. I’ll get there soon. In the meantime there is an article on the TBS site in the e-learning section about creating a cut out from a drawing. I suggest that you be patient and practice doing all sorts of animating with Little Boy and Der Der because that will be more important to master than rigging you own cut out later. You will learn so much more by trying to just animate those characters. -JK
cool, thanks again for your help, it’s very appreciated.