3D Movement

[Rasheed]

I'm sure I'm not the first to discover this, but after I received a PM about creating 3D animation with AS, I made this example.

If you want to manipulate your model in three dimensions, you will need to break up your model into "planes of movement" and use several bone layers containing one or more objects. If you rotate and translate the bone layers in 3D, you can simulate 3D movement of your model. If you put the center of a bone layer at the hinge point of a limb, you should have a very flexible setup, because you can swing the arms and legs (and head) in 3D very easily using layer rotation of the bone layers.

Here is a roughly animated example I made on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUuBF5mxVuU

I used 2D vector layers, but you could just as well have used 3D objects or image layers. I didn't fine tune the animation with switch layers, to switch to the appropriate vector layer for a particular viewing angle. If I had used this refinement for both the collar and the left arm the result would have been more convincing.

Here's the setup in layers and a screenshot showing the setup from another angle. Notice in the screenshot, the legs are in a different plane, rotated by 45 and -45 degrees, respectively, and the head is translated in the positive z direction (further to the front than the torso). I have used layer binding to bind the layers Head, Torso, L leg, R leg, L arm and R arm and in the bone layers L Leg, R leg, L arm and R arm I used normal region binding. In the bone layer Someone, I used Depth Sorting by depth and true distance.



I realize this is not a very sophisticated setup and many variations are possible. I'll leave that up to you to discover.

[Víctor Paredes]

good example, but AS has a problem. you can't apply lock bone when you have multiple bone layers inside. i'm sure there is more problems (as select each layer each time for animate one leg or the other...).
maybe there is an script that could help, but there is scripts that my limited english actually don't understand.

[Rasheed]

I see two other flaws as well. Onion skinning doesn't work with 3D and only limited with image layers. You could work around this by using a vector layer as a place holder, but this is actually unnecessarily complicating matters. You could just as well insert a screenshot of a frame, as I have done in the animation below:



It is a 25 frames long animation and I made screenshots of tweening frames 1 and 13, to create the tweening frames 13 and 25 (tweening frames 7 and 19 were made manually). The screenshots were imported, scaled and aligned, and then put into a switch layer.


frame 1


frame 13

It would have been easier (and much more productive) if onion skinning could be used in 3D and image layers the same way as in 2D vector layers.

Sorry if you think that the animation is too crude to watch.

Edit: Of course, if the animation is a simple walkcycle, you can also flip through the frames and use your visual memory to test the animation. I created this animation using the same walkcycle, putting it in a group layer and turn that layer around the y axis and translate it in the XZ plane. I did that slightly different for 3 copies and 1 robot I put on the floor sitting and bobbing its head now and then. Watch the 8 s video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP09OnH3pHY