Bones disappear when selecting specific layers

[JakobWagner]

Hi

I have a project I created a while ago, and I need to update it. On this character I have changed the hat and the hair, but otherwise it is already fully rigged and working.
I'm trying to adjust the ""Head Turn" smart bone. But when I 1. select the head turn bone and 2. enter the head turn smart bones action and 3. select the hair or the hat to adjust it, all my bones disappear from the interface and the mainline will be active.
This also happens if I select the brow layers or any of the other ones I have already setup earlier. When selecting these layers I have noticed that the bones section in the tools palette disappears also.

Probably - something have left my brain since I did this the first time, but I can't figure it out. Any help is much appreciated.


Thanks,
Jakob

[Greenlaw]

The Tools window is context aware, which means it displays tools you can use with the selected layer. In other words, the Bones tools only appear when you select a Bones layer. Same with Vector tools...they only appear when you select a Vector layer. This keeps the Tools window from getting cluttered with a bunch of tools you can't currently use.

Some Bone tools will appear when you select a layer. This is so you can select them for Linking or other binding methods.

As far as visibility of Bones, they are generally only visible when the Bones layer or one of its child layers are selected. When you select a layer outside of the Bones layer, they disappear. This is expected behavior.

If they disappear while a child layer is selected, this probably means you have a tool selected where bones are irrelevant, like Select Shape or Eyedropper.

If you need to see bones while working with a drawing tool like Freehand, Blob Brush, or Scatter, I don't think Moho allows that by default, but you can use SimplSam's Virtual Bones script to make them visible. (They're actually vector art, but the effect is the same. The script is for when you need to render 'bones'.)

This is an unusual situation though, because normally, you would add bones after you've drawn the artwork, not the other way around. That said, I seem to recall needing to do that once or twice in the past, and I think I just bound some guide art to the bones. (This was before Virtual Bones was available.) I don't remember the details though, and it rarely comes up.

Hope this helps.

[slowtiger]

This is an unusual situation though, because normally, you would add bones after you've drawn the artwork, not the other way around.

I did that: when I had animated a walk cycle which I wanted to apply to several differently looking characters. It was easy because it was just cutout animation, just a matter of bitmaps binding to bones. To see the bones on frame 1 I just made a screenshot of them and pasted that in in the correct size.

[JakobWagner]

Thank you, Greenslaw, for your answer. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but it works now.
Thank you for your time.

Jakob