Understanding the basics of bone animation

Since Anime Studio's main focus is on bone animation, this book will be following suit and providing steps for creating rigged characters. When creating your characters, you will want to think ahead of how you'll want to draw up and eventually rig the character to a system of bones. There are three ways you can use bones in Anime Studio: Region binding, Layer binding, and Point binding. They all have their strengths and different uses (and cartoonists usually end up using all three in some capacity). Hopefully, the next sections will give you a better understanding of all three systems.

Using Region binding

By default, when you place bones down in Anime Studio, they will end up affecting whatever sublayers they happen to be touching or have influence over. This provides a springy, cartoony look to the movements that occur on our characters and objects. In the past, Region binding proved to be more difficult because the bones would sometimes affect...