Hi Guys. I am aware Im flooding the forum a lot with questions. Hopefully Im not too annoying. 

I wanted to ask about If anyone is dealing with similar issue. 

Question in short : is it possible to flip a character the opposite direction without flipping the head, or the other way round, keep the body and only flip head. 

Heres my scenario LONG :  A while back Ive created a front facing and a side facing character. I was so happy when I discovered that I can flip the side facing character, and this would also flip his motion in the opposite direction. The trouble I ran into was when the character Ive created a year ago with a bunch of complex interchanging sprites, changing ears, would look awkward when being flipped. 2 reasons, when designing the character, Ive given my character (dog) a patch on his left side. 

When flipping the character sideways, to walk in the opposite direction the patch on his left, ended up on his right. At first I assumed, if I flip the body, and then reapply the normal facing head back on the body, that would fix the problem. But no, the head was still mirrored. 

I went back into the editing app, and had to copy and do a horizontal flip on the eye patch, and put it in the opposite direction. Problem fixed I thought. Then I noticed his head wasn't very symmetrical when mirrored. same thing, went back into photoshop and had to make a symmetrical head. Then all the mouth sprites, (smile slightly sideways) had to flip all thew smiles horizontally to look fine when I finally mirror the character. 

I manages to create 3 characters. With a preprogrammed head in 360 mode. For the time being the problem was fixed. I had a :

- Dog Front Facing
- Dog Side Facing (head taken from front facing character)
- Dog Side Facing mirrored (Same side facing character with all the sprites premirrored for them to look correct when I mirror character in CTA)

That was only the beginning or the trouble. 

Now imagine, if on the next episode your character needs to wear a woolly hat, and also a t-shirt with writing on it. It would be ok if I had to take the design on the front facing character, and just reapply it on the side facing character (also they can share the head, between them with a 360 programmed hat). But then theres the mirrored side facing character. 

I have to either use the same head and flip all the mouths again, the eye patch on his left side, and the eye masks and then apply that mirrored head to my mirrored character, or I have to take the pre made head, and reprogram the hat positions in 360 mode.

Ive realised this late into the project after the character was created a year ago. If I knew the trouble id get into I would have drawn my character differently, but then again why would I change an artistic choice because of technical issues.

Another solution I found is to have the front facing head hovering next to the walking body, and then reattach the head back in after effects (track it on) which isn't difficult but it relies on a third party program. A lot of going back and forth prior to even beginning to animate. 

Conclusion : Ive found workarounds, and many little tricks, to achieve a quick result, but the trouble it took me to get to this point. 

I think all this problems could be fixed with a simple trick. If Reallusion could simply add an option where we could flip mirror the head, and body seperate depending on the results you want. Because I originally though I could just simply add hundreds off sprites to 1-2 of the same characters, but the inconsistencies happen when you are working with 3 characters at the same time and trying to apply same clothing to all of them. 

Apologise for the long post, just wondering if anyone has any opinions on this and workarounds they could suggest. Many thanks for your time. 

So this is just a quick solution I threw together. The short answer is you can't flip the head of a character independent of the body because there is no flip track for the head only and no flip track for any body part other than the hip (which is the parent bone to all the other character bones).

In the GIF animation below I've used the Freebone character 'Jowl', which is basically a 360 head attached to a single hip bone as a head on a side facing character. Jowl's hip bone is linked to the character's neck bone in this example. The original character head has been switched to an empty sprite. As you can see I'm able to flip the body without flipping Jowl. Though when I do flip the body, Jowl does flip also, but I can then select Jowl and flip him back without the body flipping because Jowl is linked to the body (as opposed to the body being linked to Jowl).


I'm not sure if this works for what you need, but it may be a work-around you can experiment with using the assets you've already created. There are some problems, like, when you animate the head none of its movement will affect the body in any way like it would if it was the character's actual head, so you have to be careful not to move the link point when you're animating the head.

- TET
Animation and Video Life
The Lazy Animator - Tutorials for Cartoon Animator

Hello. 

This is probably one of the best solutions to my situation. So Thankyou for your suggestion. In my case its not about animating the character going from one direction to another, but rather to save time when having to update every angle possible with new sprites. 

Glad you found this suggestion useful. I thought it would at least give you some more options to throw  at the problem you're having.

- TET
Animation and Video Life
The Lazy Animator - Tutorials for Cartoon Animator

As far as I understand, make the body headless, and apply the head as a seperate character. In this case all I would need to do is use the head tool to turn the character. I’m guessing If I apply premade walking motions, the head would behave the same as if it was part of the character.

I’ve tried a similar thing with hands as well. When adding a prop into the characters hand, you either have the option to have it infront of the character or behind. I would upload the same hand sprite as a prop and just attach it to the original hand. That was the hand is on the outside of the object he’s holding , while the body is behind the object.

The linked 'head' character will move relative to the bone it is attached to. In my example it moves with the neck bone, but I probably should've linked it to the head/face bone.



- TET
Animation and Video Life
The Lazy Animator - Tutorials for Cartoon Animator