I’ve been following the Animate (non-pro) video tutorials. I’m a at the point where i have all the different viewpoints for the turnaround and I’m beginning to rig the character.
I’m trying to use the technique where empty drawing layers are used as fake pegs for body parts. Everything works fine except with all the body parts that are just normal drawing layers. But the arms of my character are a symbol, (basically a 20 frame symbol of an arm bending) I’d doing this so the character can have tubelike/flexible arms.
I’ve made this arm symbol its own template and then it dragged into the character’s MASTER comp. I used it for both side of the body by flipping it horizontally and also needed to position/rotate them a bit for each view. Each arm although both the same symbol are on their own layers (ARM_L, ARM_R)
So finally to the problem. I make an ARM_PEG (empty drawing) and then parent an arm symbol to it. But now i need the ARM_PEG pivot to be the same as arm symbol’s pivot. So I do a paste special and use “update drawing pivot”, but what happens is it moves the PEG pivot but screws up the position of the arm Symbol. I’m assuming thats because the symbol is parented to the PEG, when the PEG pivot is “updated” it takes the symbol along for the ride.
How can I correct this so that symbols can be brought into a character rig and then rigged into a character using pegs(empty drawings) without alignment issues?
I realize this is a bit long winded but if anyone has any idea what’s going on I would be very thankful
???
Thanks for the reply Lilly, I’m still having a bit of trouble getting paste special to work, but for now I’m can manually align things and get it to work. However, now that I’ve begun animating with the character rigged in the way suggested on the help videos. I’m having trouble keeping the peg’ pivot points aligned with the drawn elements’ pivot points.
Is there a way to have the peg pivots and the drawing pivots always align to each other. For example if I need to move the upper leg of a character but not the lower leg and foot, when I select just the upper leg and move it, I’m de-registering it with it’s UPPERLEG peg(empty drawing layer) Can I have these two stay in sync?
I’m using Animate (non-pro)
Matt
I tried using the Update Drawing Pivot and did indeed notice the discrepancy that you noticed. I did notice that there was a simple way to solve this issue:
Select your pivot tool. Select the symbol layer that has the symbol that you want to copy. Get the focus (red outline) around the camera view, either by spacebar-clicking on the camera view or by using the Focus on Mouse Enter option. Now to a Ctrl+C to copy this pivot.
With the pivot tool still selected, switch to the drawing layer that you want to paste the pivot onto. Focus around the camera view again, and Ctrl+V to paste the pivot.
I’ll investigate copying pivots from symbols more to see if I can determine what exactly the issue was.
~Lilly
Usually the reason that we want to have the ability to move the upper leg independent of its peg is if say we would like to shorten that limb and get a sense of foreshortening. Then you would have to re-align the other limbs underneath this now-shortened limb.
There’s no way to have the peg automatically come along with its child. If you move the child, it doesn’t affect the parent, only the parent affects the child. You kind of can’t have it both ways - and generally you wouldn’t want to. If you did have the peg sticking to the child, then you’d lose the ability to have some independent manipulations of that body part.
Basically I’d recommend adjusting the upper leg without moving it away from the peg’s pivot point, then you can adjust the peg of the lower leg back to match.
I’m going to also pass this comment on to the documentation team who did the videos to see if they have anything further they can add here.
~Lilly