You can rotate a GROUP of bones!

[Genete]

Or a single bone like it were points....

Use fazek's marvelous LM tool replacements!
If you select a bone or a group of bones you can ROTATE THEM using fa_rotate_points tool!!! It is not unavailable and acts like if you were rotating points!!!! EVEN you can move the rotation center!!!!

Wow!

(You can do it with normal LM tools just linking the bones to a central one and rotating the central bone, but hey! rotating bones can belong to any other skeleton!!!)

-G

PS: ALSO TRANSLATE GROUP OF BONES!!!

[Dr. Nick]

Do you have a demo of how this works? Like a really simple anime studio file showing the bone rotation?

What I'd really ove to be able to do is move a characters limbs around like in this VERY rough sketch (done using point anim)...

http://www2.bc.edu/~nagelh/exploring.an ... tation.swf

I guess that would require being able to rotate a bone in a third (z) axis. I haven't delved into the 3D features available in Anime Studio so I have no idea whether that sort of bone animation is even possible, but it would be cool.

Anyway, if you have an example of the technique you mentioned I'd love to see it.

Cheers...

[heyvern]

Holy cow! This is coooool!

There is one thing I can get a grip on though. In some cased when rotating a bone there is also translation right?

On frame 0 it doesn't matter I just noticed it on other frames it adds a translation... which of course makes perfect sense... this is cool.

I had no idea. All this time I never tried it.

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It isn't a technique actually just another way to move/rotate bones.

To test it out Dr. Nick, just install Fazek's tools. You can always remove them later. It is hard to explain.

With the regular rotate bone tool with AS, if you have multiple bones selected and rotate them, they all rotate from their own base.

With Fazek's rotation tool (bone or points) the group of selected bones rotate as a "unit". They stay together as a group and rotate. This means that there is rotation AND translation being applied to them to maintain their position relative to each other.

This is wonderful for people who have large complex bone rigs and would like to rotate/translate large groups of bones in one step.

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In your example that would require SCALING on top of rotation. If you have a single forearm bone you would animate the scale (length) as it turns. I do this all the time.

A bone doesn't have a z axis of any kind. You can only translate on the y and x. There is only one axis of rotation... which technically could be called a z rotation since it is along the front to back axis of view... it is not called that in AS, it is just rotation.

In your example SWF you would not have a need for this tool specifically. You have a bicep bone parent, followed by a forearm bone, with a hand and fingers. All connected up the chain. Rotation would be "automatic".

If you rotate the bicep all those bones stay connected. Rotate the forearm bone the hands and finger bones would follow along.

As you rotate the forearm bone you would also scale it causing the mesh of the forearm to shorten (when scaling a bone it scales towards the base).

-vern

[Genete]

Do you have a demo of how this works? Like a really simple anime studio file showing the bone rotation?

Any demo of rotating group of bone would produce same bas effect than rotating group of points by the time line. They don't maintain its relative position due to rotation is joined to a linear translation.

The useful thing of this tool becomes when you want to create several copies of the same group of bones at different and known angles. There is when it comes handy.

-G
http://www.darthfurby.com/genete/Other/symetrical.anme
(I created that skeleton in a few minutes. Just copy / paste bones (search it in the forum) and rotate them later +30 degrees each time. Same for the octopus arms.)

[DarthFurby]

Thanks for this tip Genete. Very interesting.