Animating a Character with Layer Parenting

Layer Parenting is a feature of the Advanced Layers mode in a document that allows us to establish nested parent-child relationships between actual layers within the timeline. The benefit of doing so is that we can create a rig across our layers in this way through which the manipulation of any parent layer will also apply to its children and grandchildren.

A good way to envision this relationship is to visualize a human arm. If you want to move the hand without any other arm parts, it can easily be rotated at the wrist and does not affect the lower or upper arm. Moving the lower or upper arm, however, will also change the position of the hand since it has an attachment to both of those additional structures. Layer Parenting works in much the same way, but allows no incidental movements across other structures as more natural physical motion would.

Note

Animating through Layer Parenting is very precise in that the rotations, positioning...