Peg path orientation feature

“Peg path orientation feature” is what Toon Boom Studio calls how your drawing layers move along a motion path. The standard path has the drawing move while maintaining it’s vertical position–no rotation. The peg oriented path makes the drawing rotate along the path following its curve.

How can I get this effect in Animate Pro? I’m sure it’s just some setting but I can’t for the life of me find it.

So you want one peg for panning and and one peg for rotation?

Just create 2 pegs and parent child them and use one fot he translation and one for the rotation.

Yeah, I already tried that and it works okay. What I have is a character walking from left to right across some hills and the peg has control points to make smooth curves along the top of the hills. I can do the rotation manually with another peg but since this feature is available in Studio I figured there must be some way Animate Pro can do it–just haven’t found it yet.

Cool! I’ve been able to simulate it by adjusting the rotation parameter of the peg–works okay, but definitely would be better if it was automatic. I was thinking in particular of a butterfly in flight–as it moved along a looping path it could rotate around each loop. Otherwise, it will automatically stay perfectly vertical which is not natural.

In the Studio manual it shows a clown on a tricycle following a curved path. Example one maintains the vertical position and example two it rotates along the path. I understand why this would be hard for AP to do with all of its many parameters.

So I looked into this one today and it’s not something that there’s an automatic function for already in Animate. There is a rather complicated way that you might be able to get around it, by creating an expression column and linking the rotation to this expression, but I’d have to look into this more closely to be sure that I recommend the correct expression.

I think the reason that this wasn’t applied automatically was that in Studio, since it’s totally 2D, it’s a rather simple type of math. When you get up to Animate Pro, however, you can have a completely 3D path, and thus the logic becomes much more complex. If we had a path that changed not only in x and y, but also in z, then do we keep the image plane perpendicular to a projection of the path on the camera pane? Or do we really orient the image plane completely with the 3D path? If we did that, then the drawing layer could distort with relation to the camera and produce unwanted effects.

I think these considerations are probably why it wasn’t implemented at this level, but it’s definitely something that we can look into as a feature request.

~Lilly

I’ll definitely bring your suggestions to the table!

~Lilly