Best practice for controlling orientation of a 2d character rig during an animation

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi folks,

I’m new to Blender. I just built my first 2d character rig and am trying to animate it. The character is oriented to the right, and I’d like to mirror it to face left during parts of the animation. Is there a best practice way of doing this?

My first attempt was using rotation keyframes, but rotating the character 180 degrees also reversed the z-order of my planes/images and messed up the render. I found a post suggesting to duplicate and mirror the character, but the idea of managing and animating 2 characters rather than one turned me off. Am I able to control whether a character (an entire rig, not a single plane) is mirrored per keyframe?

I appreciate any guidance that anyone can offer a newbie. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Chris

2

Parent your entire rig to an Empty and scale the Empty by -1 in the X direction. (if X axis is left and right). When you need the rig facing the other direction just animate the X scale back to 1.0, over a single frame.

Alternately you can add your entire rig to a group, if parenting messes things up. Then you can use a Group Instance to dupligroup the character at a location where the Empty resides. Same scaling trick should work with that as well.

3

Using an empty works perfectly. Thanks for the quick response. I really appreciate it.