Feb
22
Character Setup in Anime Studio
Many people have asked me how I setup my characters in Anime Studio, so here’s a tutorial. In my opinion, this is the easiest way to setup a character. See how many different body parts there are. By doing it this way, you can lay your character’s body parts where they’re supposed to go, and simply add the bones. You don’t have to worry about spreading the body parts out, as you may have seen in other tutorials.
Check out my cartoon character’s setup
Notice my switch layer named “mouths” has happy mouths and mad mouths inside of it. When I insert my voice snippets, I can choose which mouths I want for each snippet by assigning the Papagayo file to that specific mouth. This is handy if I need his expression to change in response to another character or action.
I didn’t open the two “hand” switch layer folders to show you what’s inside because I have about 30 different hands for each folder.
I did open the “eyes” switch layer to show you those. This character is pretty simple. I haven’t given him “winking eyes” or “twitching eyes,” because I haven’t needed them, yet. Most expressions can be achieved with the seven switch layers I have. I can adjust the points in the eyes with the translate tool if I need to.
It is possible to combine some of the features on this character, but I didn’t so let me explain. The collar and the shirt could have been one piece; the same with the head and hair. I didn’t do it this way because I have one file I call “Frankenstein’s monster” which contains multiple hair layers, clothing layers, body types, etc. To create a completely new character, all I have to do is choose which files I want to keep, and which ones I delete. Then I rename the file as my new character.
In the next article, I’ll split the character into his individual pieces and show you what they look like.
Bone rigging and character setup in Anime Studio
