So in Toon Boom Animate you can slightly nudge symbols forward or back to handle that. At different times during a walk cycle a character’s arm might swing in front of the body, and then in back. It might seem minor, but its a huge feature. Nudge your symbols backward and foward in z-space when they are chained up.Note: You cannot swap out symbols in Flash CS4 if they are on an IK chain The view of the hand isn’t the same coming toward the viewer as it is swinging away.

So lets say you have a walk cycle, well obviously your body parts will need to change out based on the movement of the character. Swap out artwork at anytime during your animation (while motion tweening or in the IK chain).If you aren’t familiar with IK, think of animating by pulling around the bones of a skeleton.Pull one part, what’s attached follows.

Once you have your hierarchy setup, like the hand is a child of the forearm, and thats a child of the top of the arm, you can… Setting up a character properly in Animate is a bit different, and totally worth the effort to learn how to do it right. And pay attention if you’re used to doing things in Flash.

If you’re in a hurry skip the 15 minutes of drawing, and get to the second part which is the real meat of the tutorial. Or if you just like watching someone draw, have fun. You can find another lesson on this blog that goes over most of the same stuff, but this time I’m actually drawing something that I’ll be animating, so there’s some discussion about setting it up for animation that you might want to hear.

The first part is just a drawing refresher. The free Toon Boom Animate tutorial advertised above is split into 3 parts. It won’t expire, it just watermarks your final renders but otherwise its fully play-able. But if you haven’t downloaded their free learning edition of the program, do so now by clicking over yonder. Click the image or here to begin downloading the video tutorial (150Mb) (by the time you read what its about below, it will probably done downloading)Īs many of you have figured out, I’ve become a huge fan of this program recently.

Toon boom rigging