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How do you adjust Z-Order/Heirarchy across all keyframes


Celestient

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Hello all,

 

I've been animating in Spriter Pro and so far its gone really well. However, I've come across a part of my animation process that seems inefficient, and I'm wondering If I can have some help with that.

 

The way I'm working, I basically do the following:

  1. Create first frame. 
  2. Create set of frames till the end, concentrating on one aspect of animation (example, in a run animation I focus on the legs first to get them right, then the clothing around the legs, and so on)
  3. Continue until the full animation is complete, then make adjustments.

The problem with this is as follows

  • If I introduce a new object into the first frame, adjust it for Z-order and Hierarchy, and then try to copy/paste it to all keyframes, it sometimes readjusts its Z-Order every keyframe, so I still have to adjust it every keyframe in the z order before I do anything. This has always given me issues so far for copies of objects and new objects.
  • If I made a mistake in Hierarchy and need to adjust that throughout, the Hierarchy cannot be adjusted in every keyframe through the copy/paste to all method. As such, I'm not sure what to do here to speed up the process (I really do not want to re-adjust the Hierarchy and subsequently re-adjust the item I moved in the Hierarchy every keyframe)

If I could learn a faster way to deal with this problem I'd appreciate it!

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If there are no changes in the Z-Oder of other object there is this handy setting under Edit -> Copy Z-Oder to other frames

yeah i noticed that almost immediately afterwards and facepalmed.

 

the second issue still persists though, and it seems to be dealing with bones and heirarchy causing thing to go all over the place. the only way i could make it work without problems was to make the item of contention no longer attached to a bone so i could use the Z order thing. i would like to know for future reference how to solve that issue in particular.

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Hi Celestient,

 

I think most of the issue can be avoided with more careful work-flow...IE, fully assemble and rig the character before starting your animation, and most importantly, make sure everything is properly assigned to the right parents before make any frames beyond the initial frame at zero on the timeline.

 

To give you maximum flexibility with the content of each keyframe, Spriter does not force a uniform hierarchy, z-order or even which objects are in any given time-line.  If you're careful, this is very helpful, if you're not careful, it makes thing much more time consuming and difficult.

 

If there is a sprite that is never animated by itself, and only through its parent bone, and you accidentally have it improperly assigned or accidentally shifted in position or scale etc on its on instead of via the bone, then you can select the sprite in any frame where its properly assigned to the bone, press control+c to copy its info, and then press control+shift+v to paste the proper hierarchy and position etc to all frames.

 

Cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

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