Scaling

One way to scale a character is to precomp it and scale the precomp. But that makes it difficult for the character to interact with the rest of the scene. Limber's Auto-scale system makes it easy to scale the rig without precomposing.

Auto-scale

Auto-scale is enabled by default for all new limbs. This means that if your end controllers are parented to another layer that scales up or down, the limb will scale along with it, without you having to think about it.

Usually, you would add a null or dummy shape layer at the character’s base, and parent Limber’s End and FreeK controllers to it, as well as whichever layer in the rig has no other parent (usually a central body layer). It's best to leave limb layers un-parented, because they scale 'internally' rather than through direct parenting.

With the End Controllers and body parented to a scaling null, Auto-scale does the rest. These legs use the Steamboat Willie limb from the Limb Library.

Artwork by Walt Disney

Feel the base

Placing the null at the base allows the feet to stay planted to a spot when you scale the rig. If you place the null over the character's body, it will scale from that point and the feet will drift.

Width Scale and Length Scale

These properties in the Limber effect give you the power to manually control scaling. They work in addition to Auto-scale. Some folks prefer to adjust the Length Scale of a whole limb than alter both Upper Length and Lower Length properties. Width Scale can make a limb thicker or skinnier without changing it's length.

Locators change scale dynamically with your character, so that hands or feet parented to them also scale as you would expect. By default, Locators do not scale with Width Scale - so if you have artwork like a watch or shirt cuff parented to a Locator and you change Width Scale, the artwork won’t get wider. If you need that, just enable the Width Scaling checkbox in the Locator’s effect.

A Locator's Width Scaling checkbox allows it to scale with the Width Scale property. The limb is Tapered Path from the Limb Library

How to preserve raster resolution when scaling up

If you are rigging a character with raster layers and you want the ability to scale it up while retaining crisp artwork, you can create artwork at, say, 2x and scale it down by 50% before you rig the limb. Then, when your character auto-scales up, the extra pixel resolution is preserved. This will work for both Precomp limbs and Puppet limbs.

Width Scale and Length Scale should work with any limb, but Puppet limbs may have limitations.

Scale jumping issues

If a limb suddenly jumps in size when you parent it's End Controller, it's probably because the layer you parented the End controller to (I'll call this 'the parent layer') has already been scaled up or down. You can check by twirling down the parent layer's Scale property, and setting it's parent to 'None' - if the Scale value is not then [100, 100], then it is being scaled, somehow or other. You can just Undo to re-parent it.

If your rig is scaled like this, and your limb is jumping in size, the easiest fix is to add another Null to 'zero out' the scaling. Go to Layer > New > Null Object to create a new null (you could then move it to where the parent layer is). Parent the new Null to the parent layer, and then parent the limb's End Controller to the new Null. Usually, you'll only need to do this once - you can parent the End controllers of other limbs to this same new Null.