First attempt at 'Bones' is kicking my butt...

[Hauksbee01]

I was telling a friend about Anime' Studio who replied that he needed a short animation done for a Blog article he was writing. It concerns how often young, black men die in d' Hood. He asked for a group walking down the street, and, one-by-one, they just disappear.

I've got them all drawn and broken down into constituent pieces (heads, arms, etc.) I'm now trying to assemble the first one. Since he's walking with hands in his pockets, all three pieces of the upper body (head, torso & arm) are bound to a single bone. The problem starts with the leg. There's two bones in the leg and two in the shoe. When I move the Upper Leg bone, all the children go with it. as they should. But when I try move the Lower Leg bone, everything separates. So my question is: if there's going to be two bones in the leg, must the leg be in two separate pieces? Same for the shoe?

Second question: Most times, when I click on a bone it's a red wire-frame object. But sometimes it becomes a solid filled object as in the far right figure. What causes that?
.

.

[slowtiger]

This looks like the leg is only 1 image, am I right? So if you layer bind this to one bone, it naturally can't follow another bone.
Solutions:
- make the leg into two parts, each layer bound to its bone.
- use flexi-bind with the leg, check "warp image" in the image tab in the layer panel so it can bend at the knee.

[Hauksbee01]

This looks like the leg is only 1 image, am I right? So if you layer bind this to one bone, it naturally can't follow another bone.

I take your point. I think I was misled by some tutorial I saw on YouTube where a chain of bones made a water hose flex, or some such. Perhaps it was not even an ASP tutorial at all. I was hoping that the shadow envelope that denotes 'bone strength' might also work as 'region of influence', but that's asking a lot without polygons, or Bezier points, to assign to the bone.

Back to the drawing board. 'Gonna be another long night in Photoshop.

Thanks for the help.

[dueyftw]

If your using a image you can put a vector patch under the images if the images do not have much shading. Image warping can only do so much.


Dale

[Víctor Paredes]

Back to the drawing board. 'Gonna be another long night in Photoshop.

You don't need to separate all the parts in Photoshop. Bones can bend the images too.
This tutorial will help you:

Specially from minute 4:00

[Hauksbee01]

Victor:

Thanks for the recommended tutorial, but it deals with Vector art which is essentially Bezier lines so the bones have some points to manipulate. I think I'll just have to break my limbs into two pieces.

[synthsin75]

Victor:

Thanks for the recommended tutorial, but it deals with Vector art which is essentially Bezier lines so the bones have some points to manipulate. I think I'll just have to break my limbs into two pieces.

The character in that video is composed of image layers, not vectors.

[Víctor Paredes]

You really need to learn how image layers can be rigged in Anime Studio.
It's a very powerful system, but it won't work as expected if you bind each image to a single bone.
I really recommend you to check the tutorial again.

[Hauksbee01]

You really need to learn how image layers can be rigged in Anime Studio.

OK, I'll give it another shot. Thanks.