Moho Forum

There is another advantage to this...

If the bones controlling the mesh aren't "perfect" or you want to tweak them etc, you don't have to worry about messing up the key frames.

Since you are animating only the control bones, and if they never change, you can do all kinds of stuff on frame 0 to your mesh bones without needing to change your control bone key frames.

For instance, I added an extra bone to the skeleton to smooth the mesh AFTER I had key framed the control bones. All I had to do was change the values of the constraints on some of the bones.

I love constraints. That is why I wish we had more of those little buggers in AS.

I also love that "hip parent bone"... yeehaa. I use to animate the dang layer for "global" movement... yikes... what a waste of time that was. I shudder when I think how I use to do things.

p.s. If you do this on your own from scratch don't forget to set the bone strength on control bones to 0. Also on that parent hip bone.

-vern

Of course, you can take this a lot further. Often when a character rig is complex, animators use several nested bone layers, because otherwise the bones overlap too much in certain poses, and you as animator lose control. Simply create control bones to control the bone angles and put them outside your character rig. No need for clumsy multiple bone layers anymore.