combine separate bone layers into one bone layer

[djwaterman]

I'm doing an animation of a set of arms pulling on a rope, so I made one arm in a layer with a smart bone to control the hand opening and closing into a grip pose. Then I decided (to save time) to just duplicate that bone layer hierarchy for the other arm. This is mostly fine since I renamed the smart bone and both arms operate how I want.



The thing is that now when I animate I'm only going to see each arm's smart bone by itself when a particular bone hierarchy is selected, so the question is, is there a way to have done this so that I could have had both the left and right arm smart bones visible at once and both arms under a single bone layer?

[djwaterman]

I never solved this issue and just went ahead and animated the arms separately and all worked out well. But there must be a process for when you clone an object that has smart bones and want to be able to use those actions with the clone and have them work independently from the original, and also re-name them.

Currently it seems you just have to re-make smart bones actions (left arm then right arm say) starting from scratch. Its quite hard describing what I mean.

[synthsin75]

No idea why you would make two separate bone layers in the first place. Once you already do have two bone layers, you could just control those separate smart bones by two smart bones in the parent layer of both. But unless you have a specific need for two separate bone layers, there's no need to add to the complexity. What I would do is duplicate the vector layer, copy/paste the bone (into the same layer as your first), set up an SB action for it, copy the SB action of the first into this new SB action, and then just delete the SB action keyframes for the vector layers each bone doesn't need to control.

[djwaterman]

I had no idea you could copy and paste smart bone actions, that's why I went the way I did. Thanks, I will try this the next time, that will be very helpful.