2d Animations Maya with Bones?

Alphavader

hey folks,

so iam looking arround for the simple
animatins for my little sidescroller..
Now i read this article
http://www.thecareergamer.com/braaaains-zombieville-usa-tech-review/


(making off zombiville usa ) ..

After looking for some tutorials (with less results), i like to ask here
I defenetly wanna do this in maya, but i doesnt seem that simple,
especially with the bones and so on..

1. How would you parent the bones on the plane ?
(When i do smooth bind or anything like that, the textures became
very stretched - i wanna have this southpark look
2. How did you set up the planes ? I locked the transformations, but when they
on the same coordinates, they overlapp - so is it better to put one 0.1 back and the other in the front ?
3. Someone have a good tutorial or can give me some basic advices ?

That would be great..

MikeF

well first off all i wouldn't bother binding anything, just wastes time having to paint weights, even if you did a rigid bind.

simply parent the appropriate parts to each corresponding bone.

from looking at your images i'd say the Layout would be something like this

Torso->Head
| |
|->Arms->Hands->Shotgun
|->legs->Feet

whle following this layout, moving the torso should move all the other parts while the gun, arms, legs and head can still move independently

as far as the overlapping planes, i'd say move the front leg back .1 in the X channel

tharle

surely you can render out from an orthogonal camera so you can just have the planes wherever you like as long as the layer order is correct? in fact it might be easier to have things more spread out so you can select them easily in the top view (for example) and still have them look right in orthogonal?

also if you're not binding is there any reason to use bones? can you not just make a heirarchy of the planes? you'd still get the movement of the parent happening on the children which is the same effect isnt it?

if you did want to setup a rig i'd have a look at using set driven keys and a master shape. basically you can create sliders as custom properties of an object and then link them to the animatable parts of the character - that way you only have the one object to move around and animate which makes things a lot simpler. i remember doing a digital tutors tutorial that covered set driven keys but it was so long ago i cant remember which one - give me a shout if you get stuck and i'll throw together a quick tutorial.

I quick google search found this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0XGrhKSkjI"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0XGrhKSkjI[/ame] which seems to cover it pretty well.