Help with design of hands and over all shapes; preparing for rigging

Question

Hey guys. I have been working on this character off and on for about 2 years. I keep learning more and more about Animate and the rigging process, since we now have approval for using the edapt tools. So I went back and rebuilt most of this guy so the joints are more round, and now I know how to go in and add cell shading to shapes in Animate. I am struggling with the hands, because I know it's important to design with rigging in mind and I am pretty brand new to edapt tools, so I'm not sure of all it's capabilities with hand movement. The file was created in Illustrator with the intention of importing those files over to Animate. Any design critique and advice about rigging with edapt tools is what I am looking for. Also, I can't wrap my head around creating the shirt collar. Thanks in advance for the feedback. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DBvNjQR-4gjJquJn5ULtZX9ScG_doLpz/view?usp=drive_link

n. tilcheff · Answer

Hi @Tgibs2 ,

Hands are typically put as frames inside a stopped Graphic symbol, where each gesture is on its own keyframe. Then on the outside you choose the gesture that you need to display, setting the First Frame property of the instance.

There should be one hand container with only left or right hands, and it should be flipped for the other hand.

Then you can pick hands using Frame Picker or Smart Graphic Control.

For the collar you can use hard welding. and sandwich the neck between two elements, but it may not be necessary as the natural logic of this character's design would suggest very little rotation in the neck area.

I know that you have said that the site is blocked at your school, but maybe you would be able to access it from home or via a proxy/VPN. Most of these questions have been answered in a structured way in the many available articles there:

https://flash-powertools.com/workflow/

https://flash-powertools.com/character-rigging-for-flash-animation/

https://flash-powertools.com/advanced-smr-2-rig-architecture/

You can download some of the sample rigs to study how they are built:

https://flash-powertools.com/tag/character-rig/