Shape Levels Help

[Kurto]

Greetings. Apologies if this is overly basic. For Christmas, I received Anime Studio Debut 6. I have been watching as many videos as I can find online to learn to use the software and have ordered a book (which hasn't yet arrived). I've been playing around in my free time and have been having the following problem. I'm hoping this is obvious to people used to this kind of software.

I've been having issues with overlapping shapes. Last night I was attempting to create a rabbit character. I drew the face first, then the eyes. Then I created ears. The ears were on top of the face. (the ears, by the way had an outer shape (a square with additional points then reshaped to an ear) with a matching inner shape to rep the inner ear.

I wanted to select the ears (outer ear and inner ear) and tell them to go below the face shape. But when I would have the shape highlighted, and pulled down the drop down menu (my apologies... I'm at work and can't remember if its the edit menu or the draw menu) to make the shape go into the background. But the option is always greyed out. Can anyone guess what I might be doing wrong?

I restarted several characters and kept running into this problem. Sometimes I have a shape highlighted and can change the level. But at some point I seem to lose that ability.

Any help appreciated.

[neeters_guy]

Are you using the Select Shape tool or the Create Shape tool? You must select the shape with the Select Shape tool first before using Draw->Lower Shape menu command. (See page 26 of User Manual, "Raising and Lowering Shapes.")

See if that works.

[brucegulick]

...is to draw all those elements on separate layers, then just drag the layers where you want them.

So I start by creating a bone layer, naming it ("Rabbit" or whatever), then creating a vector layer and dragging it onto the bone layer, naming it ("body", etc), drawing the body in that layer, then create another layer for head, leftarm, rightarm, and so on.

Anime Studio can handle many, many layers, so go nuts!

[sbtamu]

On deput you can select shape then hold the shift key and use up and down arrows to bring a shape up or back.