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.

My first Mr. Egg Man had a round head. This time, in keeping with the egg-shaped theme, I'm going to give him an egg-shaped head. We should put the head in its own switch layer, seperate from the body switch layer because we want the head to be able to turn even when the body does not turn. Create a new switch layer, Head, and a bone layer Head Right. Then add a vector layer, Head, inside the bone layer. Later we will add a flipped version of Head Right to give us the layers we need to turn from front to left side view. Before drawing the head, I added a simple neck shape to the Body Right vector layer.

I've drawn an eliptical nose and a pair of eyes on the Head layer. By now the method of rigging should be familiar, so I won't go into as much detail. We need two point control bones, Nose Points and Nose Patch Points. The second is to control the motion of a flesh-colored masking patch we will use to hide part of the nose outline when it is in the turned position. Refer to the image below. The masking patch is temporarily shown in green so you can see its shape.

Again by trial and error, the Nose Offset and Nose Patch Offset contraint values I discovered were 1 and 0.5. Just as a reminder, if you find that points are moving that should not be moving, select all the points on the Head layer and use the menu Bones > Release Points option to un-bind all the points on the layer.

With this simple head I'm not going to try to chage the perspective of the eyes as they move across the face. In fact, I'm just going to hide the back eye behind the front eye as they both move into position. This will require two Point Control bones, one for the front eye and one for the back eye. By trial and error the control values were found to be 1.5 for the front eye and -2.8 for the back eye. That brings both eyes to the same point when the head is fully turned to the right.

With a couple of temporary pupils added (later we will rig the eyes for movement and blinking) here is what it looks like when the head and body are rotated seperately. Now all we need is to add ears and a switchable mouth.

Drawing the ears is simple enough, and rigging the left ear, the forward one, requires nothing more than binding the ear points to the Front Eye Points bone, since the distance the front eye moves is just what is needed to move the ear. No new bones are required. Notice the horizontal reference line used to line up the ears. This is drawn on a seperate temporary layer that I use for placing reference marks during animation.

The right ear, the back one, is more of a problem. Initially, it has to be in front of the head outline, but as soon as the head starts turing that ear has to go behind the head. How can a shape be both in front of and behind the head?

Let's start just by rigging the ear and worry about its visibility afterwards. The bone that moves the ear needs to make it disappear behind the head at the same frame where the left ear lines up exactly with the head outline. Since the back ear needs to move in the opposite direction as the other facial features, we should put it on the opposite side of the root bone, as shown. Set the scale constraint to the same Head Scale Control as the other offset bones, and give it a value of 0.8. Add the Back Ear Points bone and bind the right ear points to that bone.

Now the right ear moves properly, but stays in front of the face. The first step is to move this object down until it drops behind the head outline. Then repeat the same process with the little curly line inside the ear. Now the disappears behind the head as required. Now we just need to hide the part of the head outline that is in front of where the ear is. As we've done before, we can do this with a flesh-colored masking patch that is above the head outline, but below the eye shapes so that when it moves, it will disappear behind the eyes, rather than covering them up. Colored green in the figure below, this patch just barely covers the head outline, and is bound to the same Back Ear Points bone as the back ear itself.

With the patch filled with flesh color, the result looks like this.

In the Flash animation above, tapered lines are not reproduced properly so the ears don't match in the front view. In an AVI or MOV render, the tapered lines show up properly and the ears match.

The complete Anime Studio file can be downloaded here.

I'm going to devote the entire next section to the mouth, because we will want to be able to use lip syching technology with this model, so we will have to explore the required mouth shapes in a bit of detail.