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.

If you haven't already looked at part one, You can find it here.

I've discovered that when you make a lot of changes to an Anime Studio file, some times the bones can get messed up. For example, you may find that points are being moved by a bone when they shouldn't be, or you can't seem to bind points to a bone. When this happens, there's a chance you file might be corrupted. I've even seen such corrupted files cause Anime Studio to crash completely.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to fix those mysterious bone problems by resetting the bones that are having problems. Think of it as "re-booting" the bones. Here's all you need to do:

Your bones have now been reset. You can proceed to make whatever changes you were trying to make before, such as binding selected points to the bone. If you have any problem points that will not bind or un-bind, try deleting the point and then re-inserting the point. That usually corrects that problem.

Now that we have Egg Man's arms and body turning, it's time to take a look at adding turnable legs. Start by adding a bone layer, Front Leg Bones, inside the Body Right bone layer, and between the Front Arm Bones and Body layers. Put a vector layer inside this new bone layer and name it Front Leg. Next, draw the leg as shown below. Notice how the foot is drawn so that by moving only the two circled points we can change it from a front-view foot to a side-view foot. Notice also that I turned off outlines on the shoe, since it is black anyway, and there is no need for a black outline around it.

Next, move the leg into position on the body. Go to the Body Right bone layer and using the Body Scale Control bone as a parent, add a Leg Transfer bone, a Front Leg Offset bone, and a Front Leg Point Control bone, as shown.

From the Front Leg Bone layer, select Bind Layer and bind this layer to the Front Leg Point Control bone. From the Body Right layer, select the Front Leg Offset bone and in Bone Constraints, set the scale control bone to Body Scale Control, and (by trial and error) give it a value of 4. Now when the body makes a full quarter turn, the front leg moves from the left side of the body to the center of the body as shown below.

The only thing missing is changing the shoe from side view to front view and back again. The problem is, the points we need to move are on the Front Leg layer, so they cannot be directly controlled by the Scale Control bone on the Body Right layer. For now we can just animate those two points by hand as we turn the body, and plan to revisit the problem later.

Next we tackle the back leg. Create a new bone layer named Back Leg Bone below the Body layer and above the Back Arm Bones layer. Inside that, create a vector layer named Back Leg. Copy and paste the leg shapes from the Front Leg layer to the new Back Leg layer, and position it on the body. You may want to adjust the shoe widths on both layers so that the front and back shoes do not overlap.

Now build the Scale Offset and Point Control bones for the back leg as show below. Then bind the Back Leg Boone layer to the Back Leg Point Control bone.

Set the Back Leg Offset bone scale constraint to the Body Scale bone, and use trial and error to find the right scaling value to make the two legs line up when the body is fully turned. This time trial and error ended up with a value -0.1, meaning that the Back Leg Offset bone was barely scaled at all, since the motion alone of the Leg Transfer bone was nearly enough to align the legs all by itself.

Now that the two legs rotate properly we need to take a look as what kind of masking is needed. You will notice that the back leg is behind the body, so the top part of the leg is hidden, and the body outline shows over the top of it. It would be better if the body outline was hidden in front view where the body meets the leg. Then as the body turns away, the outline should be gradually revealed. We can do that with a mask. Here is the shape of the mask. Notice that it is shown in green for clarity. When it's done we will set the color of the masking patch to the same as the color of the pants so that it will disappear.

The bottom-right side of the patch is higher than the left side so that when the patch is slowly moved upwards, the body outline will be revealed from the right side, growing toward the middle of the body.

Up until now we have moved the body parts and masking patches left and right. In this case we need to move the masking patch up and down. We also need the patch to follow the movement of the leg. That means we must use the Back Leg Point Control bone as the parent to a new offset bone. But unlike our previous offset bones, this bone will be placed vertically, below the Back Leg Point Control bone. From this new bone we will add another bone, the Pants Patch Points bone, horizontally, as shown.

If we now select the vertical offset bone and assign its Bone Contraints Scale Control Bone to be the Body Scale Control bone, and give it a value of 5 (determined by trial an error), we will see that the vertical offset bone now moves the Pants Patch Points bone up and down in response to scaling the main Body Scale Control bone. We bind the two points shown in the figure above to the Pants Patch Points bone, and the patch will grow and shrink, up and down, as the body is turned, giving us exactly the effect we are looking for.

If we really want to be perfectionists, we can add one more little refinement; a mask to hide the top line of the leg in the middle of the body when in full front view. This requires a stationary masking patch on its own layer, but with no control bones at all. Add a new layer, Front Leg Patch, and draw the shape shown in green below. It hides the top leg line, but as the leg moves, it comes out of hiding, and is exposed to view.

Fill with color to match the pants and we are done. At this point there are a lot of effects that could be applied to the body using this type of bone structure. For example, we could bind one of the belly points in the Body layer to the Front Leg Point Control bone, which would give him a fat belly that sticks out only as he turns, as shown in the animation below.