Character disappearing after trying to animate it

[Titus28827266krkv]

Hi everyone!

I'm very new to Adobe Animate and have watching dozens of tutorials on it. But I've got a problem. 
When there's no keyframes being made, my vector character works fine. But when I go to add keyframes and scrub time, and then try to actually animate the character, the part I moved stays but the rest of the character disappears. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if there's something wrong with my character, I'm just not sure. I started my 7-day free trial period yesterday and I want to use that time to learn this program before deciding whether or not this is the program for me. Any help is definitely appreciated! Thanks!

[kglad]

any parts disappearing are encountering a keyframe where the part doesn't exist.

[Titus28827266krkv]

Okay...now again I'm very new to this so...what do I do? 
Do I make a keyframe for each second on each body part or...?

[kglad]

among the ways to handle this is to distribute each body part to its own layer.  that way you'll be able remove keyframes from layers where a part disappears without affecting other parts that have been edited in their keyframe.

[Titus28827266krkv]

Okay. Now how do I distribute each part to a layer? Do I just create a layer and then drag a part to that layer? By the way, thanks for answering my questions!

[kglad]

that's one way.

another is to click the initial frame of the layer with the body parts (to select them all) and then right click over the selected group > click distribute to layers.

[Titus28827266krkv]

What is the frame of the layer? Is it all of the assets that on the right side of the screen or is it the different colored boxes in the timeline? The reason I'm asking that is because I'm trying to work with a puppet and it's showing all the body parts in the timeline. If you'd like, I can show you a picture of the screen.

[kglad]

frames are the individual components of a layer (and layers constitute timelines).  

[Titus28827266krkv]

Oh okay, I see. I'll give that a try. Thanks!

[kglad]

more info:

[Titus28827266krkv]

Thanks for the picture, but I tried your method and it worked! Thank an awful lot!

[kglad]

you're welcome.