Hey, I've been following your tutorial for making flash rigs, and I had a quick question. When posing the rig, and I want the arm layer to go above a layer it's normally behind, (like the chest or something) what do I do? Do I just have to make another arm layer?
The only way is to make another arm layer.
There’s two scenarios to this: 1, the motion occurs after the arm is already extended, or from a still pose. All you have to do is cut-paste the arm to the above-body layer before the motion begins.
Scenario 2, the arm is visibly behind the body, then it moves around to come out front. If you’re using tweens, what I’d do is set the arm animation up on its original layer, imagining the chest isn’t there or isn’t an issue. Then, make 2 keyframes at the point immmediately before and after it flips in front of the body. From the timeline, cut the FRAMES of the latter half of the motion, and move them to the above-body layer. You’ll need to apply a blank keyframe to the original, below-body keyframe where you just cut it.
basically it’d look like this:
[upper] _____________[chest] [o___________][lower] [o———–—>[o]
[upper] _____________[chest] [o___________][lower] [o—>[o][o—>[o]
[upper] ______[o—>[o][chest] [o___________][lower] [o—>[o]______
if my ascii art makes sense
If doing it frame by frame, you can just do the movement and then move all the frames you need to to the upper layer, so it has a bit more finite control.
The Janimation toolkit also has a ‘quicktween’ that can take advantage of labels to automatically do custom eases across two layers, to transition something from back to front or vice versa. https://youtu.be/lMscnW7gSAE
