Bones

The bones are the core of the rigging process in Duik, both for characters and props. They’re After Effects Shape layers used to drive the artwork layers. Instead of working directly on the art layers, one can work on these bones, so that the artwork won’t have any expression. This allows to easily modify or replace the artwork even if it’s already been rigged, to re-use an existing rig for multiple characters, and helps the Duik Auto-rig know what it has to do to build the best rig according to your type of character and limbs.

The bones come with their envelops, which are references to help you design perfectly shaped joints for your cut-out characters, and their noodles to quickly design nice, bendy, smoothly-curved limbs like if they were soft rubber. Softness can only make the world better, don’t you think?

The Bones panel and tools

The bones panel consists essentially of a toolbar, and categories to create predefined or custom armatures to be rigged later with the Auto-rig feature.

You can set a Character Name in the top field to automatically add the name to all new bones in the composition and keep things organized easily.

The toolbar at the top of the bones panel gives a quick access to several secondary but useful tools.

This video is part of the official comprehensive video course about Duik Ángela

Content

• Create bones
• Bone envelops
• Bone noodles
• Autorig
  • Introduction
  • Arms and legs
  • Spines
  • Tails and hair
  • Wings
  • Fins
• Tools
  • Select bones
  • Show/hide bones
  • Duplicate bones
  • Link art
  • Edit mode
  • Bake bones
  • Bone settings