Moho Forum

Hi, I'm new to the forums and Anime Studio. I've gone through the supplied tutorials and manual for Studio Pro 7 - that's the extent of my knowledge. I've built a scene where two characters are having a tug-of-war moment, fighting over a lollipop. Each character has a foreground arm and a background arm. I'd like to sandwich the lollipop between the arms of both characters, as shown below:



The way i got this preview image was that I had to split the lollipop into two pieces(circle layer and stick layer) and nest the circle layer into the weasel bones layer; the stick layer into the kat bones layer. As you can guess this looks horrible when I have to animate it. I'd prefer the lollipop to behave as a single object, on a single layer if possible. I've been fighting with this for a while, so any suggestions are welcome.

In a separate file, I'm experimenting with the z layer to accomplish this. But even after going into File --> Project settings and enabling Sort Layers by Depth (checked) and Sort by True Distance (checked), as well as arranging arm layers behind and in front of a single lollipop layer along the z-axis, the lollipop layer still appears in front of all the layers instead of in between them. I made sure I moved it correctly by checking the scene with the Orbit tool.

My last resort is to mash the two characters and the lollipop into one bone layer and just redo the bones, but I'm hoping there is a simpler, more elegant solution.

Add a bone to the lollipop and bind all the points in the lollipop and the arm end points to that bone. Make sure you do not have the lollipop bone parented or a child to any other bone. Now just translate the lollipop bone and it should like like this. If you do not mesh the characters you will just have to do a lot of point animation to make it look like their hands have a hold of the lollipop. You could just mesh the arm of the cat to the other character for this one scene if there is not too much body movements.

I like the way it looks. I'm a little confused with the term "mesh" though.

Make a copy of the arm, move it out of the character and into the other character. Adjust layers scaling/translation. Make the arm invisible in the cat and visible in the other character at the moment the tug starts. You will need to add a bone to the arm so the forearm does not move.

IF you like I will show a simple video showing what I mean by tomorrow.

No need for the video, I got it. I made the changes and it works perfect now. Thanks for your help!