Day 23 / 38 – Moho
Creating an action with just one bone (smart bone) helps you refine how your character parts move, all the way down to individual points. This gives you precise control over deformation, making your animations smoother and more expressive.
By adjusting point motion within actions, you can fine-tune subtle details that bring your character to life—whether it’s a bend, squash, or secondary movement.
Things to Know:
✔ Create an Action with Smart Bone
Create an Action
In this case, I rigged little Carrot Top with a target bone to control the arm, so that’s the bone I used to create the action. However, the thumb is still facing the wrong direction, and I’m not sure what the easiest way to fix that is yet.
- On Frame _0, In Layers Panel: on your character. Select the bone you want to create the action with. Create a New Action (make sure the bone and the action have the same name).
Set up a Bend for the arm:
In the Layers panel, still on your character. Go to the timeline of the action panel, go to frame 96. Using the target bone, move the bone to the most extreme position of the action.
Next, in the layers panel, go the artwork for the arm, and edit points in any position along the timeline that the arm gets wonky.
Go back to Mainline, and move your character and the action will adjust as you move.
Set up a Blink
For this setup, the eyelids are drawn as separate shapes and already positioned at half mast. That created an extra challenge when building an action to fully close them, since they’re not starting from a neutral open position. Plus all the hand drawn lines, it took a bit more adjustment and I never really got a clean, natural blink.
- On Frame _0, In Layers Panel: on your character. Select the head bone. Add a new bone, set bone constraints, label bone “blink”, show label, create a new action.
Animate a blink:
In Layers Panel: go to the eye artwork.
Go to frame_96, move the blink bone all the way to the left.
Move the eyes to the closed position.
Go back to the main frame and animate with the blink bone.
You can see on the right eye that I was more precise with selecting and moving the linework, while the left eye ended up a bit more uneven. I guess perhaps in some cases, that kind of inconsistency can actually add a bit of charm, depending on the look you’re going for lol 😉
Smart Bones
So many lessons in this one. At its core, each action follows the same basic process: create the bone, create the action, animate the first extreme pose, then create a new action and animate the second extreme pose. From there, you refine and adjust as needed.
I’m not too upset with my very first head turn, especially considering I don’t really have a separate “head, ” as it is a full body character and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the arms and legs yet, so a lot of it was pure experimental.
“Creative freedom is a huge carrot.”
— Adam McKay
Day 23 — Afterthoughts
This was a blast, hard, but fun. I can see so much potential here, though I still have plenty of questions about how to achieve everything while keeping the looser, less vector looking style that I prefer. So many lines to consider.
Onward 🥕 nik
