link a group of smartbone to an antoher general bone, but still have the control of each one.

[viccho]

Hello everybody.
Here's my issue : i have a smart bone for control my right eye blink, and an other smartbone for the left eye. I made a third smartbone for control simultaneously the blink of the two eye. But i cannot now manipulate the 2 first smartbones independently. there ar "locked". I search on tuto and on this forum, but and do not find an answer. Is there anybody here to help me ?
Thank you
i've a nice day

[Greenlaw]

That should be pretty straightforward to do. I do this all the time.

1. Create a Smart Bone Dial for each eye and make sure they work work independently.
2. Create a third Smart Bone Dial and use it to rotate the first and second Smart Bone Dials together.

If they're not working, try clearing the Smart Bone Dial keyframes (just for the dials, not the animation) and recreating them. This should be easy to do and you shouldn't have to recreate the animation keyframes inside the Smart Bone Action. In rare situations, it's possible to throw off the rotation of the dials which can have the effect of 'locking' the Dial. (For example, this can happen when you reparent a Smart Bone Dial.) Generally, you want to avoid changing and SBD's parent to another bone with a different rotation, or completely unparent the SBD and then reparent it to another bone with a different rotation. Whenever I must do that, I recreate the dial's rotation keyframes to make sure everything still works properly.

To be safe, I parent each SBD to a master 'SBD Mover' bone when I create it so I don't have to worry about it. (The master bone can be parented to a character's root if you like.)

Hope this helps.

[viccho]

Thank you for take a time for answer me. I'll try this tomorrow and tell you

[viccho]

hi
i've tried but i did not succeed. May be i do not understand some shade in your explanation about the keyframe to delete or not (i'm french ) Here my step :
- create 1 bone for the right eye blink.
- make SBD.
-deform my eye
-manipulate : it works

do the same for the left.

-create a third bone
-make SMD
-select the right blink bone
-animate it to fit the rotation of the general blink bone

-test
-i can manipulate le general blink bone and it make move the right blink bone
-But now the right blink bone cannot be manipulate.

[Greenlaw]

Hi,

I threw together this demo project to show how to chain Smart Bone Dials together. This is basically what I was describing earlier. Feel free to download it and pick it apart:

Download: eyesBlink.moho



If you have further questions, please post here. Or even better, upload an example project of what you're having trouble with.

I'm a bit busy this week but if I can't answer immediately, I'm sure other users here will jump in.

Hope this helps!

[Greenlaw]

I re-read your previous post and I think I understand what you're describing.

So are you saying when you close both eyes using the Both control, you cannot open the right eye using the Right controller? That's normal. The Both control is meant to take over the first two controls, and normally you wouldn't want to animate the Both and the Individual controls at the same time; that would introduce animation conflicts.

To animate each eye individually, you want to use the individual controls. Only use the Both control when you really mean to animate both eyes together; if you're unsure, don't use this control. You can use the individual controls and the Both control in the same animation project, just not at the same time.

If you find yourself in a situation where the Both control is active and you need to open one eye, simply pick a frame before the motion to open both eyes using the Both control, and then close both eyes using the individual controllers. Now you can use either individual control at the frame where you wish to open the eye.

Hope that helps. If not, I think you need to post an example project.

[viccho]

hi. thank you so much for taking time. i'm grateful.
i've open your example project. It seems that's pretty de same way i've done it.
In fact, i have my general blink bone to make my char blink, and i still want to have the blink conrol of each eyes, to make some face expression.

I've found that it work on frame 1.
on frame1 i can manipulate the 3 bones which i cannot do un frame 0.
So i can animate, it"s what i wanted.

Thank you again

[Greenlaw]

Oooh! So I'm guessing you were testing your smart bones on frame 0 then? That's not recommended. It may work for really basic Smart Bone Actions but, as you may have discovered, more complex Smart Bone Actions cannot be tested reliably on the setup frame (frame 0,) you need to do that on an animation frame (frame 1 or later.)

What I typically do is jump between an animation frame (usually frame 12 or 24,) and frame 0 using Design Mode. This is a good way to test other features of the rig that can't be tested reliably on frame 0, like IK, target bones, bone strength, and custom rig UIs. Design Mode remembers the animation frame you're working in and toggles between that and frame 0.

I don't think Design Mode has a hot key assigned by default, so you'll want to do that. I prefer to use my MQC tool for this because I find it easier to click on a button. To see how that works, scrub to 2:10 to see a demo.

Hope this helps.

[viccho]

how thank you for the mqc. i see that my repquest wasn't well formulate at the beginning. i've to enhance my english.
thnak you aganin
have a nice day

[Greenlaw]

Hi viccho,

Your English was perfect, all that was missing was the info about testing the Smart Bone Action in frame 0 instead of on an animation frame. This is a common mistake because Moho allows users to do some testing at frame 0.

You just need to be aware that not all rig testing can/should be done at frame 0. Testing at frame 0 is fine...until it's not.