Pivot points for newbie

I just downloaded the trial Toon Boom yesterday, so I’m completely new to it. It looks great, but at the moment I’m hung up on a couple terribly simple things.

I’m following a tutorial on creating a basic walk
( http://www.toonboomtutorials.com/2007/create-a-basic-walk-cycle-with-toon-boom/ ).
(1) Pivot points: When I select the rotate tool and select a layer, I don’t get a green circle within a green circle. I get a box with a handle & a little white circle inside.
(2) (Even more basic) How do you look at several layers at once? Whenever I click on another layer, only the drawing in that layer is visible.

I’m on a Mac, OS X 10.3.9. I’m using the Toon Boom Studio Trial v4.0. I downloaded a corresponding Toon Boom file that goes with the above tutorial, and I have the same problem.

Thanks for your help (and patience with stupid questions!).

TBS has two principle views for creating animations, they are drawing view (like your drawing board) and camera view (for compositing and camera style work). In order to use any of the scene planning tools (compositing tools) you must be in camera view. On the upper right side of your view panel there are four icons in a vertical stack. The top one is to get you into drawing view and the second from the top icon is to switch to camera view.

You are currently in drawing view which is why you can only see the selected element layer. If you press the key board short cut key L you will turn on the auto light table (it’s like back lighting your drawing board) and you can then see through all the element layers. In camera view you can see through all the layers all the time because that’s how compositing is done.

Additionally, you most likely will need to be on OSX 10.4.x to use TBS V4.0 successfully. -JK

Thanks very much!

"Additionally, you most likely will need to be on OSX 10.4.x to use TBS V4.0 successfully."

Oops, I guess I could have checked out the system requirements, couldn’t I?!.. And I s’pose I should wait til I get OSX 4 or 5, rather than try to find a copy of Toon Boom 3.0 that might work on my system… Nuts. Thanks much for the advice.

Either way, I’m interested in eventually getting Toon Boom. Seems to have a number of big advantages over Flash, which I have not exactly been able to master…