Hello everyone, I just downloaded the trial of Studio tonight, and have been pleasantly surprised by how intuitive it is. However, there is one thing that I’m having trouble figuring out, and that’s how I have connect the bones of multiple layers.
I have a basic human character I’ve made. I’m using three layers and they’re each separate columns with no different rows. The top layer is the head and the left limbs, the middle layer is the torso, the back layer is the right limbs. It’s done like this because the character is facing the right, so his right limbs would be behind his torso when he walks etc.
I tried to give him a “spine” on his torso (middle layer) to use as the bone parent for all his limbs, but parenting the limbs to the torso cause them all to switch from their layers (front and back) to the layer of the torso (middle). Surely there is a way around this, but it eludes me. It’s impractical to make him move without having a parent to move the entire puppet with.
Usually you would set up the character with every body part at 0 Zdepth (front/back information) and to “nudge” the body parts into their proper positions. To do this, select the body part and look at the “Properties” window.
Add a “master” Peg and drop your character onto it. Then move the master peg to move your character as a whole. We have some examples in the resources section (tips & tricks, tutorials, templates) since there are different methods or styles of rigging a character, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
http://beta.toonboom.com/home-users/toon-boom-studio/resources
One last thing… It’s actually easier to make a character puppet using a peg-hierarchy instead of using bones and it’s also lighter on your graphics resources. The bones feature is only necessary where there are bitmaps or detailed textures involved that you wish to deform that are part of the character.
I know this answer is late, but I saw this question ages ago, and I didn’t know the answer. Now, I figured it out. You also probably already know this, but for other people who don’t, here it is: I just created a drawing on the same layer with all the arms and body and legs and head apart from each other. Then I created individual bone structures for each of them. Then I parented all the bones to a single “spine”. Then I used the “bone movement” tool to attach the bones in the right position on the first key-frame. Then I opened up the bone peg and went to the skin peg. Then I created different layers within the skin peg and just copied and pasted different body parts. This way, the bones, while being connected to each other, still affected the drawings on different layers. I had to limit bone influence on some body parts as to not affect the other body parts (using the bone influence tool, and then selecting ellipse in the properties), but other than that, it was perfect.
I found the tutorial here:
firstly,
then
most of the stuff is in the second link, but a bit of it is in the first link.
Also, peg heirarchy is just hard. There are holes everywhere when I try to bend the limbs.