animating bones seperately

[velvetelvis70]

Hi - Hoping someone more experienced might help..

I have a character rigged with bones and I do my first pass of animation (in this case the head and neck)

Now I go to do my second pass (in this case, legs) and it's clear the first pass has set keys on every bone each time I posed my character. This is obviously affecting the interpolation on my second pass

So..

Is it possible to break the bones into groups and animate them separately?

Or autokey only the bones which I move, leaving the others for another pass?

[Víctor Paredes]

If you are working on Pro, the normal behavior is each bone have its own rotation/scale/translation channels. In the timeline, the red line represents the keys of the selected bone or bones. So using that line, you can edit each bone separately.
The gray line shows a keyframe in every frame where any of the bones have keys. So, the gray line is a general vision of the keys and the red lines is for specific bones. The same behavior applies for most of the elements in AS.

Now, if you are on Debut, probably you only see one channel for any movement you do and no red line. If so, go to the preferences and uncheck "consolidate timeline channels".

Take in count that if you are using the Manipulate bones tool, if you move a bone, all the bones included in the chain will have keyframes too. For example, if you move a hand bone, arm and forearm will be keyed too.
If you want to be sure to only key bones one by one, use the Rotate bone tool instead.

[velvetelvis70]

Thanks Selgin - Using rotate bone only did the trick