Grab and match movement?

[Horseguy44]

I'd like to apologize in advance, I've only had the Thanksgiving Holiday to work with Anime Studio Pro 11, so my questions may be parochial to the extreme. I'm a heavy Clip Studio user and only animating as a request of a client to take our technical illustrations into instructional video! Needless to say ALL the images I'm animating are .png outputs from Clip Studio...no vectors. (Please don't suggest using Clip Studio's frame by frame option. Very slow for what I need.)

-I've created a hand with a movable and bendable thumb (yeah bones!) which slides across the screen and grabs a swab. Said swab tips up slightly as fingers pinch its stem, and then...I need the swab, which is not in the hand group layer, to match all the movements of the hand as it moves about the screen. Both the hand and the swab spend a period of time not moving at all to begin with, and the swab only needs to match movement with the hand after it is picked up.

I tried simply moving the swab to the same position as the pinching fingers at the matching key frames but some waver (because of ease in/out?) makes it look mis-matched as the hand moves, and frankly, this seems a brute force method. What is the cool guy efficient way to do this?

-Fade in a group layer? Why does the group layer become 100% transparent when opacity set to 0, but 100% opaque (visible) when opacity set to 1%. Is this a quirk of a group layers? I've turned on the "allow animated layer effects" and clicked on another layer in case being active makes it visible, but no luck. Either it is fully opaque or fully invisible. I got around it by making every layer in group layer folder fade in individually, but again, kind of clumsy and easy to get out of sync. Hints or tips?

Thanks to all patient enough to help!

[Greenlaw]

If I understand your description correctly, you should be able to keyframe the parenting of the q-tip to the hand bone on the frame where the hand 'grabs' the item. You can do this interactively using the parent tool and the modifiers described in the tool tips.

(Edit: I should have added that the q-tip should have its own bone for this to work.)

Alternatively, you can make two q-tip layers. The first one is in position (on a table or wherever,) and the second is already parented to the hand. With Allow Animated Layer Effects enabled, switch off the visibility of the q-tip in the hand, or set the transparency to 0%. Do the opposite for the second q-tip. At the point where the hand 'grabs' the q-tip, exchange the visibility of the q-tips.

Either method works. I tend to do the second option even when working in 3D animation because it simplifies setting up the 'exchange' (no special rigging or dynamic parenting required), but this usually depends on what else is going on in the scene.

Hope this helps.

[Horseguy44]

Greenlaw, much appreciated.

If I wasn't in rush time panic mode, I'd explore your first suggestion (and still will afterwards) but your second one (that I'd considered myself) will be the fix for this project. The others in my office are in awe of what is already being accomplished!

Thanks again!