Fiziwig's Animator Studio Tutorials

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

At this point we can delete the image layer with the sketch of Grimdore since we won't be needing it any more. Before we can add bones we need to create a bone layer. Bones cannot be added to vector layers, only to bone layers. (The exception, bones in switch layers, will be covered later.) Click on the top layer in the list to select it, and then click on the new layer tool and select "Bone" from the layer type dropdown menu.

Next, we need to tell Anime Studio which vector layers will belong to this bone layer. Starting with the next layer down, drag it up into the bone layer until the bone layer box turns red. Then release it. You will notice the layer we just dragged is now indented to the right showing that it is inside the bone layer now. Continue dragging each up into the layer above it and releasing it as soon as the bone layer box turns red.

Each bone, except for the root bone for the character, is associated with another bone called its parent. What this means is that when the parent bone is moved all the child bones will move in unison with it. For example, when we move the body up, as in animating a jump, we obviously need the arms and hands and legs and head to all stay attached to the body and move with it. Likewise, when we move the left upper arm we want the forearm and the hand to move too. We do this by making each bone has the proper parent. In other words, the spine is the parent of the shoulder. The shoulder is the parent of the upper arm. The upper arm is the parent of the fore arm. The fore arm is the parent of the hand. And so on. If our character has movable fingers then the hand is the parent of each finger bone.

When a new bone is created, whichever bone was selected before becomes the parent of the new bone. After the new bone is created it then becomes the selected bone. Thus it is easy to create a chain of bones, say from the spine to the hand, by creating the bones in order: shoulder, upper arm, fore arm, hand. Before starting to create the bones for the other arm, however, use the bone select tool to re-select the spine bone to start the new chain.

Bones move points, points move lines, and moving points and lines cause shapes to change the form. But which points will a bone move? Let's go over a couple of important items using just one shape to start with.

You should now have something like this:

Now find the Manipulate Bones tool and click on it. Select the to bone and start dragging it around to see what happens. Don't worry about messing thing up. You can snap everything back to home position by clicking on the bone select tool.

The first thing to notice is that dragging the toe bone around causes the shape of the boot to warp to fit the motion. This is something we want to happen. But notice also that dragging this bone, or the shin bone, or the thigh bone, also cause the right arm to warp its shape. It also causes the whole body to twist around and warp a bit. This is something we do NOT want.

There are a number of different ways to tell a bone what points to modify. What we need to do right now is to get the bones to modify only the points in their immediate region. Double click on the bone layer in the Layer window. A window called "Layer Settings" will pop up. Select the "Bones" tab and you should see something like this:

What we need to do first is to click the "Region Binding" button so that the selection box looks like the picture at the right. That solves part of the problem. But you will notice that the body still flops around, and if you push the foot far enough, it begins to distort the hand as well. The reason that is happening is that there are no other bones in the body to keep things stable. If there were an arm bone attached to the spine, the spine would not be free to flop around. If there were a bone in the hand then the hand bone, not the foot bone, would be the one controlling the hand.

Let's go ahead, then, and put some bones in the right arm and hand (the one on your left). Begin with the Bone Picker tool and select the spine bone. Remember that the selected bone will be the parent of the next bone we create.

Your bones should look roughly like the picture below. If you make a mistake and draw a bone too long, or too short, or in the wrong place, just select the bad bone and hit the keyboard delete key. Be sure to pick the right parent before drawing the new bone. You can verify that the bones all have the right parent by clicking on the chain link button in the Bones section of the Tools window. This will show each bone's parent. If any bone has the wrong parent you can also use this same tool to pick a new parent for the selected bone.

Notice that we did not start with the upper arm bone. The upper arm is not attached to the spine. There's an extra bone from the spine to the shoulder. How else could you shrug your shoulders? There a still a couple of problems. Moving the arm bones cause the shoulder pad to distort. That's not really a problem becuse that will go away as soon as we put a bone in the shoulder pad itself.

The other problem is more serious. When the arm is moved inward toward the body, the sleeve gets so distorted that it twists over on itself and makes a mess of things. Fixing this will require the insertion of a special bone in the sleeve.

The basic theory is that since a moving bone pulls on the points, a bone that doesn't move will hold the points still. In other words, to take command of points that aren't suppose to move so much, we can add a bone close to those points; a bone that doesn't move so much.

Consulting the outline image above, select the upper arm bone (not the shoulder bone) as the parent and draw a small bone in the position shown. Now manipulate the upper arm and you will see that the small sleeve bone moves in synch with the upper arm. The problem is, it moves too far, too fast. What we really want is for the little bone to split the difference between the shoulder bone and the upper arm bone. In other words, we want it to always stay between those two larger bones. What we need is whenever the upper arm bone turns, the sleeve bone needs to turn half the amount. There is a way to do that.

There are three ways to make a bone move. One way is directly with the bone manipulation tool. The second way is to move a parent or child bone. The third way, which we haven't seen yet, is to set up a bone to automatically move in some prescribed manner as controlled by a control bone. We will set up the upper arm bone to be the control bone of the small sleeve bone.

Control bones are picked by name, so the first thing we need to do is give the upper arm bone a unique name. Normally, we don't need to name bones, but in this case, the control bone must have a name. Using the bone picker tool select the upper arm bone. You will notice that as soon as the bone picker tool is picked up, some new information appears just below the main window menu bar. To the right of the "Select Bone" window is an empty window where you can type the name you want this bone to have. Now that the bone is named we can use it as a control bone.

Using the Bone Picker tool again, select the small sleeve bone. We haven't named the sleeve bone, and we don't need to name it, so ignore the space where the name would go. To the right of the empty name space is a drop down menu called "Bone Constraints". Click on that and bring up the panel for setting control bones.

Under "Angle Control Bone" look at the selections and pick "R Upper Arm" (or whatever name you gave the upper arm bone). This is why we needed to name the control bone; otherwise how could we pick it from the list?

Now when the upper arm bone moves, say, 20 degrees, we want the sleeve bone to move only 10 degrees. But the control bone has already moved it 20 degree for us, so we have to take half of that back. That means we have to subtract half of the distance it's already moved. So in the slot to the right of the name we put -0.5 for the strength of influence. Now close the window and try the bone manipulation tool again. Everything should look pretty good. For every degree the upper arm moves, the sleeve bone moves half a degree, holding that bit of sleeve in place for us.

There's still something wrong with the leg. Notice how the the boot nicely morphs to fit with the motion of the bone, just like the arms and shoulders did when we played around with those. So why doesn't the leg bend at the knee?

The answer is: because bones control points. Take a look at that leg shape. There are NO points down the length of the leg, only the four points at the four corners. If there are no points, then there are no places where the bones can morph the shape, so the shape stays un-morphed except at the corners. The answer is as simple as putting a couple extra points on the leg. Use the same Insert Points tool you use for drawing shapes. Just click it anywhere along a line and point will be added to that line. I've found what works best is to put a single point behind the knee, a little ways below the knee joint, and put two points on the front of the leg, one just above the knee and another a little below the knee. You might also (optionally) try making the single point behind the knee a peaked point so the crease behind the knee is sharp when the knee bends.

The last objects to be rigged are the head and two shoulder pads. Select the spine bone as the parent and draw a single bone up the middle of the head. Re-select the spine tool as the parent and draw a bone from the inside pointed end of the shoulder pad to the opposite side. Re-select the spine bone and draw the bone in the opposite shoulder pad. The shoulder pads will not be positioned manually during animation. Instead, they will be controlled automatically by the shoulder bones. Name both shoulder bones as we did for the upper arm bones, and then select each shoulder pad bone and select the corresponding shoulder bone to be the control bone. Set the control value to "2". The will cause the shoulder pads to "ride up" as the shoulder is shrugged.

To finish off the shoulder pads, lets pick the shoulder pad bone again and open the "Bone Constraints" panel. Check the "Angle Constraints" checkbox and enter the values -70 and 20 for Grim's right arm (your left) and -20, 70 for Grim's left arm (your right). I'll go into more details about angle constraints later on, but for now just notice that this prevents the shoulder pads from sagging too far and falling through the shoulder of the tunic.

Now we are ready to tell Anime Studio where the pieces actually belong. With the bone layer selected, use the Offset Bone tool shown at left. With the tool select the main bone of each object (arm, leg, head, shoulder pad) and move that object to its correct place on the figure. Now click the Bone Munipulator tool and try everything out.

At this stage you might discover some crazy-looking things have gone wrong. When you move a bone all sorts of strange things happen. Pieces of the body get stretched out, objects somewhere else on the screen start moving mysteriously. Here's what to look for when that happens. Check your parent links. Are the bones connected to the right parents? When I first rigged Grimdore his left hand made the right shoulder pad fly up in the air! It was a simple matter of forgetting to re-select the spine as the parent bone before I drew the shoulder pad bone. The solution was to select the bone with the picker, grab the reparent tool, and click it on the spine.

Another common problem is when you go to offset the bones to their correct place some points that aren't supposed to move get dragged along for the ride. Usually when that happens to me it means I didn't spread out the body parts far enough apart and one of the bones picked up points from a nearby body part. If all else fails, you can delete the offending bone, move the body part further away, and then re-rig that body part.

Take a look at the screenshot at left. Notice the difference between the right sleeve and the left sleeve. Notice that in the area circled in red Grimdore's left sleeve (your right) has torn loose from his tunic when he raised his arms. This is because the sleeve belongs to the arm bones and moves as they move. What we need to fix that problem is to pick a couple points on the sleeve and tack, glue, staple or nail those points to the body so the sleeve won't tear loose. In other words, we need to bind a couple points to the spine bone. Easily done.

First, grab the Bone Picker tool and select the spine bone. This is the bone we want to bind to. Select the Arms layer in the Layers window. Next, grab the Bind Points tool shown here.

Your main window should now show Grimdore pulled apart in pieces. The Bind Points tool works just like the Select Points tool for picking points. Pick two points at the lower inside edge of the sleeve (see picture below), and with both points selected, hit the space bar to bind the points to the selected bone. Those two points are now bound to the spine, but even though they look like they are in the right place, they are actually in the wrong place in relation ot the body they are now bound to. Grab the Manipulate Bones tool at this point and you'll see what I mean. What you need to do to complete the job is to grab the Select Points tool and move each of those points to the place you want them nailed to on the body. Once you've done that to one sleeve your main window should show something like this:

Now if you grab the Manipulate Points tool and play with the arm, those two points should stay put when the arm is raised and lowered. Repeat the process with the other arm, and that's about all for this session. Here is the complete anme file so far. In the file you will notice that I bound a top point on each sleeve to the spine as well for good measure.

A Word of Warning: When you select points with the bind points tool be sure you select every single point on that layer that you want to bind to the bone. When you hit the space bar not only will it bind the selected points, it will UN-bind all the non-selected points. So when you bind the left sleeve after binding the right sleeve, you must be sure that all the points on both sleeves are selected, or else you will get strange results when you start animating the character. The unbound points won't be bound to any bone, so they will stay stuck in the same place on the screen no matter how the character moves.

P.S. After I completed this section I went back and added another little bone in the skirt of the tunic so that lifting the leg would cause the tunic skirt to lift up, preventing the leg from poking through the skirt. I used a control value of 0.75 which worked just fine. I also extended the leg shape a bit at the top to prevent the top corner of the leg from showing when the leg is kicked up high. You'll find those changes in the anme file as well, along with a little karate kick animation for Grimdore.