Bone Tool with Shapes and MCs

[garyk1639025]

Hi Folks,

I'm have a character with a 'flour sack' body type, very simple, essentially a blob with a face. To avoid traditional animation, I was hoping to use the bone tool on the body shape to allow the character to lean forward and backward, with the body shape being distorted appropriately by the IK system.

However, as the face is animated using keyframe caddy to lip sync and change expressions,  it is a movieclip. I find I am unable to connect it to the armature used for the body shape. The face is a movieclip, the body is a shape. Thus, if I animate the body leaning forward, the face does not move with body, and is not linked to the head area in any way…

Does anybody know of a solution to this?

I was thinking perhaps having one armature for the body shape on one layer, and an identical armature linking movieclips, including the face, on another layer. But this means manually animating two independent armatures and hoping they appear synchronised…

Thanks in advance

Gary

[Myra Ferguson · Accepted solution]

You are correct. You can't add bones to a combination of shapes and movieclips. You have to pick one or the other. Since your facial animation is in a movieclip, could you make the body out of movieclips?

[garyk1639025]

Thanks for the quick reply Myra, I was worried this was the answer.

The 'flour sack' style of the body doesn't seem to look right when done with movieclips. I'll give the layered armature's a go and see what happens.