head turn with bone dial when assets are offscreen

[mystd]

I put assets offscreen since it's easier to manage them, they are not in the way while animating. My problem now is I want to make a headturn with bone dial but the assets are all offscreen on maintimeline frame 0. The headturn is going to happen much later in the animation so I can't even use the other layers as reference. Is my only option to rebuild everything on maintimeline frame 0 and make the headturn and then put everything offscreen again? How do you manage this. The scene is getting very complex with a lot of layers and folders. I have trouble animating everything if it's all on the screen. So I only put the things that are needed on sceen, I'm already switching visibility on and off like crazy. How do you manage this?

[slowtiger]

I just put everything where it belongs. If needed, I switch off visibility during animating.

[Greenlaw]

To simplify it, just put all the background layers in a single group layer, and place your character in a different group above the Background Group. Now, when you want to hide the background, you only need to hide the single Background Group but you will still be able to animate your character.

Optionally, you can render a single frame of just the background and import that image to a layer below the Background Group. Set this image layer settings to Do Not Render and the Opacity to about 25%. Now you will see a 'ghosted' version of your background image as reference that you can more easily animate against and not worry about this version rendering. (You can adjust the opacity to taste of course.)

If you want to go a step further, un-hide the Background Group and set it to Hide In Editing View--this will make the layer 'disappear' when you're animating the character, and it will still render without changing the settings. Additionally, you will still see the 'ghosted' non-rendering version of your background for reference.

[mystd]

@slowtiger I do that too but I use a lot of layers and have many characters on screen and it got very full so I started placing things offscreen.

@greenlaw that is a nice tip but I don't have a background yet. It's 5 characters interacting with each other. Every character has a ton of layers in folders and subfolders.

I've put everything together on frame 0 and I'll just render from frame 1. Guess there is no tidy way doing this.

[chucky]

Yeah, you can do this easily!
I do very often

Split the screen using the split screen button on the bottom right of the workspace.
Select the view you want to place the controls in and go, menu view/ direction/front.
Then pan and zoom to the controls and voila!
The screen split will be saved for the next time you open.
One downside is that the camera view won't update until you release the control bone in the front view.



One good thing is that you can place all the controls for various characters in the same place so they just appear as if by magic when you switch character.
Just remember to be smart about hierarchies in the block of controls - give them all a separate parent bone to position with.