Hi. I’m having an issue with setting my pivots in Animate 2.
Everything was working fine: I’d cut out a piece of the puppet, set the pivot, reset, and set, until I found the appropriate placement.
However, out of nowhere, I went to work on a piece of the puppet (one of the arms), and when I went to set the pivot, the arm jumped out of place. Anytime I moved the pivot, the arm suddenly jumped to another location.
I then went to check out the other pivots, and see what would happen if I tried to reset them, and the same thing happened! The piece would jump to an odd location in the screen.
A related problem was happening when I was cutting the lower portion of the arm from the upper portion: As soon as I would send it to a new layer, the lower arm would jump to some random location and I’d have to move it back to the proper position, instead of it just pasting into the new layer in its proper location.
Hope someone can help!
A bit more info on my problem… I started a new file to try to recreate what went wrong with the pivots and while I was able to recreate the problem, I am still unable to figure out how to rectify the situation. Here’s what I did:
1. I drew a shape, and colored it. Then turned it into a key frame.
2. I used the ‘set pivot’ tool to move the pivot to a new location.
… so far so good… the image didn’t jump into a weird location every time I adjusted the pivot.
3. I ‘turned’ the object on its pivot and let it rest on a different angle than it originally was at (in other words, I rotated the image on its pivot about 45º or so).
4. I once again used the ‘set pivot’ tool to move the pivot to a new location, and WALLA: The image jumped out of place each time I moved the pivot!
This also explains why when I cut the forearm off of my puppet and sent it to a new layer, the forearm jumped to a random location on the screen: because I had already set the pivot for the full arm at the shoulder, and rotated the arm a bit.
So, that’s what CAUSED the problem, the question still remains: how do I RECTIFY the problem, and also, what do I do to keep this from happening again? I mean, in working with the puppet and even building it, you check things out by rotating them a little after you’ve set a pivot to make sure the placement is good, so it doesn’t make sense that this should screw everything else afterwards… how do I make it so I can do these tests and not make everything jump around afterwards? 
you need to rest the animation.
There is a shortcut but i can’t remember. Somebody else remember?
That’s a start, thank you, but how do I do that?
And if it does turn out that’s the problem, how can I prevent this from happening again?
The way to avoid it is don’t align things with the animate transform tool, align them with the standard transform tool.
I will play with animate and see if I can find the command to reset. Someone in the forum in the past posted it. I am sure once Lilly posts she will know the shortcut/how to access the tool.
Here I show you a very enlightening response gave by Lilly, explaining about pivots discrepancy in camera view:
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Re:Shifting Symbol
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2010, 04:21:58 PM »
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Well the way that a symbol’s pivot works is different from the way a regular drawing pivot works. And the reason is that a symbol can have many layers inside of it, so how do you tell the symbol which layer and which drawing has the correct pivot for it to use?
What you should do is double-click to go inside the symbol. Notice that there is a big light-grey cross. This indicates the pivot of the overall symbol. If you activate your pivot tool, you’ll see where the blue pivot for each drawing is. If the symbol’s pivot is in a different place from the pivot of your drawing, you might run into a discrepancy.
Now with your pivot tool, set the pivot on each of the drawings so that the pivot is in the right place. (If you need to, you can copy and paste the pivot from one drawing to another by having the focus in the camera view with the pivot tool on and doing a Ctrl+C, then go to the next frame and get the focus in the camera view again and Ctrl+V). Next, you’ll need to select each drawing with the pivot tool on, and in the tool properties window you’ll see the option “Copy pivot to parent symbol”. Make sure you do this on all the drawings so that the big grey cross is lined up with the blue pivot that you set.
Does this solve your problem?
You can also verify that your drawings are lined up properly by going into the symbol and turning on the onion skin to see the drawings on top of each other. If you need to adjust the position on any of the drawing layers, you should do so with the select tool.
~Lilly
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You can probe testing if the drawing pivot, is in coincidence with the symbol pivot (if you are using it).
It is significant that the final answer in this post can be clarified by support if something beyond our knowledge and that can be solved otherwise… may be a shortcut as related by TheRaider.
Yoryo
Hi,
From what I understand from your basic issue, using the Pivot tool, you are setting the PERMANENT pivot.
Using the Transform tool, you can then animate your drawing. If you need to temporarily move your pivot, do it with the Transform tool.
If you move the pivot again using the Pivot tool, you are changing the permanent pivot which recalculates all of your animation from this new pivot position.
Does that help you in any way?
Marie-Eve
Thanks for his input clarity in this discussion Marie-Eve.
I think that an oficial video tutorial that unify clearely all concepts about using pivots, showing, what the user can do, and what never can do in each instance of using pivots in drawings and symbols, copy and paste, with and without using setting the pivot on all frames, reseting pivots, using the paste special - update drawing pivot, adding template contents with pivot and adjust it to use the same pivot that are in the previous drawings, copying these pivots in the parent symbol and how manage the drawing parts in camera view using the transform tool and too using the temporary transform pivot, not the pivot tool itself, that popping out if it is placed in a new location, setting the peg pivot with rotate, scale or skew tools not with transform tool, can be fully used by all users for understand clearely and definitely this important aspect of the rigging and animating puppets process. Thank you very much.
Best Regards.
Yoryo
Hi,
You are welcome.
A video about Pivot will be published shortly on the Animate and Animate Pro How To page once we start teaching how to build cut-out puppets.
I will make sure to transmit your comments to the instructor.
Also, using symbols to build a cut-out puppet can be handy, but to animate in production can slow down the process a little bit and limit the possibility of morphing. You cannot morph between 2 symbol cells.
Make sure not to embed symbols inside symbols, you will cause yourself more headache than good.
Good luck!
Marie-Eve
What is the shortcut for clearing animation?
For Reset Animation the shortcut is R, and Reset All Animation Shift+R (with Toon Boom Animate shortcuts mode.)
Yoryo
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for the help. Yes, Lilly, the issue was resolved by resetting the animation.
However, I am still a bit confused at how, going forward, I would do some things. For example: if I’m creating an animation with my puppet, but in the middle of the animation, I want to change the location of the pivot… not in a temporary way, but to a different location that will continue for the rest of the animation… how would I do this without the piece jumping when I try to change the pivot to its new permanent location. If I ‘reset’ the animation on that frame, wouldn’t it kill the animation of the previous frames that I’ve already animated?
That’s probably not wonderfully clear, and I’ll probably figure it out once I get there, but thank you all again for your help. I keep reading the manual as I’m working, and sometimes it’s pretty clear, and sometimes I feel it’s a bit unclear, so I look forward to your video tutorial on pivots.
Ok… I’m sure I’ll have another question soon. 
Hi,
If you use Drawing pivots, you can duplicate your drawing using the DUplicate Drawing function and set a new pivot for this particular drawing.
That should do the trick.
Marie-Eve
I just wanted to double-check here and see that the issue was resolved. When you set a pivot on a drawing layer and that drawing jumps, the reason is that there has been some animation placed on that drawing layer. This is the reason that everyone is suggesting that you reset the animation on the object.
Was the issue resolved?
~Lilly