Layer Target Point Script Idea

[DK]

Hi capricorn33.
I'm so glad someone can see where this is going. The 2D "AS Mannequin" came about from working with my daughter on traditional pencil animation style FBF. My daughter was trying to make a pencil turn around and she was having trouble keeping the character at the same size after about 10 frames. I felt a set of guidelines would be extremely usefull here so I created the AS Mannequin to help keep track of proportions in a FBF animation and added in the 1/4 view head so that eyes and facial features can also be tracked.

I have'nt had time to do a lot of work with this as it is still in development but my workflow so far is to quickly create the motion in AS with the Manneqin, (it is extremely quick to do with this character), then use the resulting animation as a rotoscoping guide for your FBF work.

EDIT: I am planning to implement this technique in my next animation job that comes up requiring FBF so there will be examples in the not too distant future. To be honest....I would'nt even attempt to hand draw another character sequence without this tool.

I hear everyone on the forum asking for better FBF animation features in AS but we must all stop to think that a lot of users just don't know how to do FBF animation and I would hate to see such features implemented in AS and then used only by a select few. So we need something to help educate people or give people a leg up guide for FBF character animation.

I would be happy to give you a copy of the AS Mannequin I have developed. Please pm me if you're interested.

Cheers
D.K

[ponysmasher]

I have a script for tracking point motion, but it's after you've already animated them: http://animestudioscripts.com/temp/ds_trackpoints.zip

You select a point, run this menu script and a group layer will be created with the same motion as the selected point.

I guess doing it in realtime wouldn't be too difficult. Perhaps you could bind the points to layers by putting a point in a group named the same thing as the target layer?

But you wouldn't get rotation though. I know how to calculate the angle between two points but I don't see how you could figure out the hierarchy of a point skeleton.

[DK]

Hi Pony.
I have actually decided to use a simple point skeleton and bones to bind the points. It solve the problem and it works quite well.

Cheers
D.K