Arc-Solver Madness?

[Greenlaw]

When I find the time among other scripts I'm working on, I've been debating whether animated bone visibility should be a priority.

That would be fantastic Wes! That said, I truly believe a lot of the things I've brought up recently need to be integrated as native features in future releases of Moho. Seriously, SM should contract you to do this officially. You've already contributed so many essential 'missing' tools and features.

[synthsin75]

When I find the time among other scripts I'm working on, I've been debating whether animated bone visibility should be a priority.

That would be fantastic Wes! That said, I truly believe a lot of the things I've brought up recently need to be integrated as native features in future releases of Moho. Seriously, SM should contract you to do this officially. You've already contributed so many essential 'missing' tools and features.

If only. But it doesn't seem likely with their dev team downsize/shakeup and worrying financials. Actually, it didn't seem likely even before that (at least there was zero hint of the possibility). I have done proprietary scripting for a few studios, but many studios have tight enough budgets to try recruiting their animators (or others not as familiar with the Moho API) to do their scripting. Most of what I write for the community satisfies my curiosity of IF something can be done or is something I need personally.

[dondo]

Great technique. I'd come up with something close, but my assets were different enough that I could just leave the bones in place. I was trying to figure out how to use "shy bones" to hide the things I didn't want to see (with a keyframe so they'd show up and disappear at the appropriate times), and came up empty.

But frankly moving the bones "off camera" is clear hack. As I've been coming up to speed I've been a bit surprised about the behavior around showing and hiding bones. "Shy bones" were particularly puzzling, and I am thinking that shy bones and bone colors are a partial, lame implementation of bone "groups" (equivalent to layer groups).

I've been thinking that Moho should offer the ability to group bones together into a named collection (and arbitrarily associate a color with that group); then we should be able to show/hide any group independently, with key frames. I was planning to use that in a smart bone, along with a switch layer, to be able to show the assets and bones within a rig appropriately. What Victor came up with is probably better; when you define a bone group, you should be able to specify whether bound layers should be hidden when the bone group is. Now, instead of moving things off camera, you can just hide the bone group you aren't using, along with the bone-specific asset, and... done.

Is there anything like that? Are there scripts that do that?

[Greenlaw]

Yes, it is a hack, but it's a very good one.

Great technique. I'd come up with something close, but my assets were different enough that I could just leave the bones in place. I was trying to figure out how to use "shy bones" to hide the things I didn't want to see (with a keyframe so they'd show up and disappear at the appropriate times), and came up empty.

I use shy bones all the time for control bones that I absolutely don't want the animator to touch. This is because these bones are only meant to be driven by other SBDs, and if the animator keyframes these 'shy-ed' bones, the rig will break. Shy is also good for hiding parts of a face rig that aren't meant to be touched by the animator, or simply to reduce screen clutter.

Shy isn't keyframeable though, so it doesn't have much use for rig-swapping. This is why we move the bones off-screen and hide the artwork layers, both of which are keyframeable. If the rig is all parented correctly, the 'outside' bones never get in the way when you're animating the character and you can just ignore them.

It's not actually necessary to move the bones off-screen...this is only done to reduce screen clutter and make rig editing and animation more manageable. But If we had keyframeable bone visibility, it wouldn't be necessary to move them off screen.

[dondo]

Sorry for the delay reading this - was traveling this week.

Why do you prefer Shy Bones to just hiding the bones you don't want the animators to play with?

[Greenlaw]

Because once you enable the Shy Bone option on a bone, you can hide/reveal the bone using a toggle switch without ever selecting the bone. This is especially useful when you want to toggle the visibility of a specific group of bones all set to Shy bone without having to re-select the bones like you would have to with the regular Hide/Reveal Bones command.

It would be even better if we could assign a bone group property to bones, and be able to keyframe the hide/reveal property of a bone group. This way we can hide and reveal multiple groups of bones in smart actions. Or make custom selection sets for Sketch Bones...like all the bones in a long tail, for example. Or to easily hide/reveal 'shaper bones' to reshape a drawing from the Bones layer when needed. Being able to keyframe stuff like that reduces screen clutter and can make a complex project much easier to animate.

The devs are aware of this need so hopefully, they're working on it.

[dondo]

Ah, right. That makes sense, thanks. The idea of bone groups was the totally awesome idea I totally came up with all by myself that nobody else has ever thought of (that the devs are already aware of and hopefully working on. )