Placing Hand In Front Of Face

[toshiyori]

In my animation I am trying to have my character salute in a proper military faction. I cannot get the hand in front of the face, How can this be done ?

[hayasidist]

use animated layer order.

but you have to have the character designed to do this - so that probably means having the saluting arm in three layers (or groups): hand, forearm, upper arm.

then, in the bone / group that holds both the head and hand layer, in the depth sort tab, "enable animated layer order"

and in the timeline, just before the hand reaches the head, move the hand layer (or group) [and maybe the forearm layer too, depending on your design] to be higher in the stack than the head layer (or group); and then, on the way down, move it back to where it came from just after it leaves the head

[GCharb]

Do as hayasidist suggest, and in my case, I design my characters so the arms are made of two pieces, an arm and a forearm, this way You can put not only the hand in front of the character, but you can animate the forearm going front and back, in stuff like a walk cycle.

[3deeguy]

In addition to what has been said you can make it easier to track the layers as they move above and below by changing the layer color in the Layers window. If you right-click just to the left of the 'eyeballs' you can choose an optional color. You can change it back to plain if you no longer need to track it.

[sceech]

Hi,

I had to make an astronaut salute, so I cheated by just making 7 arm positions as Switch Layers, including the start position.
You can hide the "boned arm" with Visibility. I copied the whole start arm as a new layer into a switch layer, then just copied the start arm, altered it a bit, copied that pose as the next switch, til I had seven positions for a perfectly smooth salute.
It took about 15 minutes to make all 7, because each is just a slight variation of the previous, you "copy as you go". It gives you the chance to microscopically change details (fingers, hand angle, shading, etc) as the salute progresses, without the risk of screwing up a Timeline animation with Bones, as Switch Layers are easy to correct and simple to work with on the Timeline (one dot each). Before or after the salute the character can do whatever else you want with the normal Boned arm. Hide the Switch layers by simply having an empty switch layer.

Aye, aye, sir!

[BruceJ]

Share the pending picture so that we can see exactly what the problem is.