Swinging the arms (19/25)

Animate nested Symbols to create flexible, free swinging limbs.

What you learned: The process for making the leg strides is repeated to make the arm swings.
* Select the arm Symbol. Ensure that the pivot point is aligned with the guides for the shoulder’s joint widget.
* Go inside the arm Symbol and ensure that its timeline is extended out to the length of your cycle.
* Ensure that the lower arm’s pivot point is aligned with the guides for the elbow’s joint widget.
* Disable the visibility on all layers except the near arm and near leg Symbols. This allows you to focus only on animating the arm in reference to the leg.
* Set keyframes for the arm based on the timing notes. Then pose out the swing of the arm by rotating around the shoulder pivot. Transform only the rotation for now.
* Remember, the arm swings in opposition to the leg. When the near leg is forward, the near arm should be back.
* Once the shoulder swing is set, go into the arm Symbol to bend the elbow, just as you did for the knee and the leg.
* One way to introduce lag and overlapping action is to offset the timing of the elbow bend. In this example, the elbow bend keyframes are delayed (moved forward in time) by four frames.
* The lag can be further exaggerated by introducing breakdown keyframes halfway between the existing Keyframes.
* One the rotation is set, the position transforms can be set on the arm to track with the shoulder position on the body.
* Now that the near arm position and rotation is set, the frames can be duplicated onto the far arm layer. This creates a second instance of the arm Symbol.
* The far arm symbol can have its brightness lowered slightly using the Color Effects property, the same way the far leg was tinted.
* While the entire frame span is selected, lock all the other layers and reposition the arm to track with the far shoulder.
* Last, edit the Symbols of each of the arm components to set the pivot point crosshair layers as Guides again. This will keep them from displaying or rendering further up in the hierarchy.
* Save your incremental progress as a new file.