Animating arms

[southwestform]

My puppet designed in AI has separate layers for the arms.

1. When in the Timeline, sometimes I am able to click and drag on each arm and sometimes I am not able to. What needs to be done to make sure I can always drag on the arms?

2. When recording I can move one arm at a time. How would you record an animation where the puppet is moving both arms at the same time?

Thanks.

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

If it is not registering moving an arm, my guess is the “Dragger” behavior is not armed (the red dot is not on). You can turn it on and off, e.g. if you don’t want to record drags.

An important concept is you can record over the top of an existing scene and timeline. It will only record new values for the armed behaviors (the red dots are on). So for two arms, you can record one arm, then go back and record the second arm.

However draggers are a bit different. Instead of recording a take per dragger handle, it just shows one take for all dragger handles. You arm/disarm Draggers as a whole - you cannot arm/disarm them individually. So you can record one arm, then rewind the playhead and do a second dragger recording for the second arm, then at playback it will show both drag recordings. HOWEVER, while recording the second arm drag it will not show the first recording, which makes it hard to get right.

There is a trick if you want to - you can add additional dragger behaviors to your puppet. E.g. you can add a Left Dragger and a Right Dragger. If you enable one of them at a time, you can record the first arm per normal, but for the second arm you enable the second dragger. That way it shows the playback of the first dragger and you can get the two arms to sync more easily.

Oh, the other approach I think is to get a laptop with a touch display. I think it can record multiple touches at the same time then. (I have never tried this!)