As a follow-up installment to last week’s of our Tip of the Week - Using Symbols our resident expert and Professional Product Manager, Lilly Vogelesang, demonstrates some items which several users commented on in that blog post.
Before watching this video we recommend that you view the Using Symbols post first and also read the comments in the post. Here is the link to last week’s Using Symbols blogpost.
Using Symbols – Continued
In this 7 minute long video, Lilly will show two different ways of foreshortening an arm in Toon Boom. The first way is to save a template with the keys. Beginning with a single-piece arm and a hand with a pivot point the video shows ways of swapping out to a foreshortened arm in the upper arm layer. It then moves on to saving a template of keyframes.
The second way is to swap the arm out and have a second copy of the hand by duplicating the drawing, moving the drawing to the new position and setting the new pivot point. And saving a template of swaps.
Lilly continues by explaining the difference between saving drawing swaps and keyframes. Finally, working in the timeline is discussed.
We welcome your comments, so if you would like to discuss this please leave a comment in this blog post.
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Thanks for this extended symbol coverage Lilly. I sincerely appreciate the efforts.
Largely in Flash, I use symbols/containers that hold all my “poses” and try to avoid animation within those containers/pieces for the very reason you mention: It does slow you down and complicate animation when you need to jump inside every object to address animation. I will, however, definitely nest things like character heads, and deal with the facial animation in a separate head symbol with it’s own timeline that I make sure works with the time line of the whole character/stage. Since there is no parenting in Flash, I believe this IS necessary for timely production because otherwise animators are managing/positioning/tracking all the pieces of the head and face on the main stage as the character moves around.
But as I said before, each piece is generally a container with unique drawings to swap to. Sometimes there are special cases where I’ll have a foreshortened arm and it’ll have a little animation inside (say the settle of a long sleeve) and I’ll then go back to my standard forearm that has all the poses in it.
And yes – agreed, I have no issues re-positioning a hand every now and then when things pop/change/misalign : ) Sometimes that’s the fun part when you’re trying to work in a little bit of drag or settle to the movement.
I think your videos demonstrate the possibilities of swap out methods in Animate – either by drawings or saving templates. I have no doubts that Animate can mimic Flash’s production methods on that front.
However, I’d like to combine the advantages of a symbol/container/swap system with that of a parenting system and I wonder if that is possible in Animate.
For example, a character jumping straight up in place. I’d love to build all the symbols for all the pieces to start. Perhaps some foreshortened arms that I swap to as the character bends down in anticipation. Maybe a new head symbol (that holds all the parts of his face inside) with a slight tilt looking down just before lift off.
Once I have all my symbols in place and animated individually on the main stage, I’d love to “link” them or parent them to a “master object” or a null object. When the character leaves the ground, I would then set keys on the master/null object that would “carry” all the symbols up and back down for the jump itself. This obviously speeds things up by not having to key/tween every part of the character traveling up and down. It also allows the main motion to be controlled by the parent while things like the arms can be keyed separately as they follow through with the action.
When the character hits the ground, I’m back to keying the individual symbols, swapping to different poses, as the character impacts with the ground.
In Flash this is messy and cumbersome at times because at the point of lift off, I need to re-organize all my pieces into a special container that will allow me to animate/move the entire character, then strip down back to individual layers when the character hits the ground. A bit of a derailment.
So linking symbols together would be tremendously helpful for how I work. And something I think many Flash users would love to see and make use of in any software package.
However, I can’t quite tell if this is possible in Animate. With different drawings and templates and symbols that all seemingly have the same advantages of swap out methods in Flash, can they all still exist as part of a larger parenting structure? When I swap out drawings or templates on the layers in Animate, will those different components still be “linked”? If Animate supports a parenting system based exclusively on LAYERS, then I would guess the answer is YES, it would work. Meaning, your layers are the things that are parented/linked to each other. It’s no matter what you have in the layer (symbol, new drawing, template) those objects will always retain their links.
Thanks for reading and addressing my specific questions. I don’t mean to babble, but at the very least I hope to communicate some animator wishes that have fallen on def ears at Adobe for years.
I definitely feel the importance from Lilly and the team at Toon Boom to share knowledge and help the community of animators out there : ) Thanks again!