two armed grab or hold

[paulvdaley]

I am new to using this software with any kind of seriousness. I love how much sense it makes about 85% of the time. This post is a result of a problem I have in the last 15%.

All of the examples I can find relating to overlapping layers exist in these tiny microcosms where it is super easy to either move a layer on the z axis in front of the other layer and then in back of it again... or maybe use some other trick with switches or flipping layers off and on to get the effect of something appearing behind and then in front of another thing.

I get that.

What about when you want one character to sit in the lap of another character and ride down a slide together? The bigger character is behind the smaller character except for the arm closest to the camera (which would be in front of the smaller character).

What I ended up doing was animating the whole thing and then made a copy of the bigger character. I placed it on top of the smaller character and hid everything except for the arm closest to the camera. So, I got the visual I wanted pretty much, but editing it is not going to be awesome, since I would probably end up trashing that arm layer, fixing the animation and then re-doing what I said above.

Seems like there is a better way. Does anybody know what it is?

Thanks,
Paul Daley

[sbtamu]

You could have just stuck the smaller character into the larger character's bone layer right below the arm layer then bind the whole smaller character bone layer to the main bone in the larger character. This will work good if you do not use much bone scaling.

[paulvdaley]

Would I still be able to animate the bones of the smaller character?

[sbtamu]

Yes. I'll post an example.