Bone tool for .ai vector objects

[Alina Keblas]

Hi there to Adobe Animate aka Flash gurus!

I am trying to learn character rigging and animation and switched to try AA.

However, despite of all the tutorials I watched online something goes wrong: when I import my illustration from AI (it contains all the parts of a human character and that parts contain shades and some clothes as masks) and try to rig it with the bone tool, I simply can't use bone tool with it! I tried converting parts to symbols and ungrouping - didnt work out. The only way is to use Break Apart, but that disables all the masks inside a part and animates just plain piece of body (without shades and details it contained as masks).

The question is: am I doing something wrong or I can't use my AI artworks and need to redraw everything in AA?

P.S. I am completely new to the program, before was animating only with After Effects and it worked with masks inside layers.

Thank you to everybody, appreciate any help cz already desperate here .)

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

Sorry that nobody answered your question already. One interesting thing is that the answer has changed since you asked the question, so there is a better answer now!

For the old answer, Illustrator layers and paths can be quite complex. It would be worth taking some time in Animate to select the parts that are part of the same object, and to use the Break Apart option in the Modify menu to simplify those objects. Once you have it down to one object for each body part, the Bones tool may be easier to use.

The thing that changed recently is that with the CC 2019 release there is layer parenting. If you made sure that each part's Illustrator layers and paths were in the same Animate layer, you could then set that layer to be a child of another layer.

You can read about the new feature here:

Create timeline layers with Animate CC