Unlinking drawings

I have the front part of my rig set up the way I wanted it, however there are some areas that I have flipped. For example when I made the right arm chain, with my pegs and pivots, I decided to save time by copying all the nodes in my network view and flipping the pegs to the other side.

I realize now that these seem to be linked together, so I can’t hand animate or swap any drawings on the arms without it effecting the other side.

-Is there a proper way to copy nodes without it linking to the other side so I wont have this problem in the future?
-Is there a way to unlink these drawings after they have been copied so I don’t have to do the whole chain all over again?

thanks in advance!

You have to make sure you ‘duplicate’ instead of ‘cloning’. If you just make copy and paste it will clone your pegs and drawings, and they will be linked. You can duplicate a layer by right-clicking on it on the Timeline and select ‘Duplicate Selected Layers’ or via the Edit > Duplicate. You can assign a shortcut for this operation (it’s not assigned by default).

To correct that issue you would need to delete the cloned pegs and create new ones. You can copy the position and rotation values and then just flip the x axis. You might use keep the cloned drawings if you won’t be needing to change them (if you alter one the other will also be altered).

I would recommend copying the art itself from one layer to the other and flip the drawing with the select tool, not changing the layer/peg values. That way you will have two independent drawings on the correct position with no transformation applied to them.


Luis Canau

I’m not sure if it works with what you are trying to do with puppet animation but I did find a solution thanks to my experience with Maya! when I have issues in Maya with parenting items to hosts then unparenting I just make a copy then hide the original, copying over all the deform data from the original. this allows me to re-parent the object in a different order! I learned this in a rigging course. I realized I could do the same thing in Toonboom by creating duplicates of the layers I wanted to edit. for frame by frame animation when I have this issue, (and this is tedious but doable provided it’s not over a minute or something and you have an hour to spare) I copy each frame of the layer’s drawing objects with select all, and go manually into the menue after selecting the new edit layer at the same frame and pasting the “object” being careful not to choose to paste the frame. I WISH there was a way to turn off frame pasting temporarily, like how one can turn off “animate” or “onion skinning”. This would make life easier for everyone. as it stands now the program uses some sort of AI system to determine what it THINKS you want to copy and paste depending on which window you selected last… this can be difficult when you are doing frame by frame animation and don’t want to clone a frame but rather copy a drawing in it and make changes to the rest of the frame. I also wish there was an easier way to create auto-frame setup for animation on 2’s or 4’s or 1’s etc. like a template then turn that on or off. again the program is still pretty awesome for what it is and there are workarounds, but they are tedious and it would be nice to not have to blindly stumble around constantly having to scroll up to the settings and click “paste object” every single time for what… I mean think about the time that wastes.

Enough of my ranting: The idea is to copy over the drawings manually for each frame onto a new layer using “Shift+ A”.

I’ll suggest using “paste special” option.
the Shortcut is CTRL+B
This system (with the appropriate setting like “create new columns” and “Reuse Existing elements” enabled) will allow you to duplicate the arm’s chain and be free to swap drawing without swapping the “brothers” of the other arm’s chain.
The “reuse existing elements” allow you to share the same artwork, so if you change the artwork on one the other will automatically update
see documentaion:
I hope it helps
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/advanced/reference/dialog-box/paste-special-dialog-box.html