how to hug?

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zeynepsila
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 16, 2018 4:06 pm

how to hug?

Post by zeynepsila »

hi everyone!

This is my first post here. I hope somebody helps me to solve my urgent problem. In my animation project A and B are hugging each other. I made a copy of the A which stands back. I deleted all the layers of A other than its arms. I put these arm layers in front of the B and they are invisible till the hug moment. IN that moment, the A 's arms become invisible and copy arms grabs B' back. AT first everything is fine,I did. But after some time - although I didn't do nothing- arm vectors looked strange, they lost their proper shape, they didn' follow bones. :shock:
How can I solve this problem?
thanks in advance
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Greenlaw
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Re: how to hug?

Post by Greenlaw »

What I usually do when I need two characters to interact this way is make a reference of at least one of characters, move the reference above the other character, and then hide all the layers in the reference I don't want to see...for example, hide everything but the 'foreground' arm. Then I keyframe this reference to be invisible until I need it. So, when this character 'wraps' an arm around the other one, I then keyframe the reference to become visible (if necessary, I'll keyframe the arm in the original to hide at this moment.)

Naturally, you'll want to adapt the above to suit your situation.

Tip 1: If you want to keep the arms 'in-sync', you should only animate the original rig, not the referenced one.
To help from doing this accidentally, append the referenced character's name with REF and change the color to red. This will hopefully keep you aware that it's a reference and shouldn't be directly animated.

Tip 2: I'll sometimes set up a layer comp that will allow me to switch between seeing all the layers and hiding all but the layer(s) I want to see. This can be helpful when you need to temporarily see all the layers in the reference and switch back again.
zeynepsila
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 16, 2018 4:06 pm

Re: how to hug?

Post by zeynepsila »

Thank you very much. It worked!

I didn"t know that using reference layer other than copy layer is important.
I have another question- If I need to change vectors points, where should I put keys? Because You said don`t make animation in ref layer. For example hands become wider and I need to change fingers` shape.
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Greenlaw
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Re: how to hug?

Post by Greenlaw »

It depends on where you want to edit it. If you animate it in the original, you only have to worry about that one layer. If you animate it in the reference, it will break away into a separate animation from the original. This might work out okay for your animation but if you need to switch the visibility back to the original, the animation will be out of sync. If you only animate the original, the animation will be exactly the same in both versions.

But there may be situations where it makes sense to have a different animation in the reference. It's not an absolute rule, just do what makes sense for the current situation. In production, there's a fair chance that I'll be asked to make some changes to my animation, so I try to set things up so they'll be easier to edit in the future.

On the chance you unintentionally animate the reference, don't be concerned because you can re-sync it to the original. The downside to that is you may lose changes you made to the ref you wanted to keep. In that case, copy the animation so you can paste it into the original after re-syncing.
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