smart bone action weirdness - advanced hand rig test

[biglogan]

hello all

I am a newcomer to ASP10. I have been playing around for about a month or so and while I seem to have a general grasp on the basics of rigging, I have decided to make a super complex hand rig to test both my understanding, and the limits, of the software. A limit appears to have been reached, or at least speed bump.

I have created a rigged hand with smart actions on the finger and thumb bones (to clean up creases and so on) and now I am attempting to create dials to extend and curl each finger. When I do this however, only the first bone of any given finger actually moves in the timeline. I have created a test dial called "fist test" to illustrate the problem. When I am in the smart action timeline everything appears to be fine, but when I go back out to mainline and then try to animate with the smart bone dial, only the first bones on each of the fingers animates (see attached image)



The only thing I can think of is that all the bones that are not moving have smart actions already applied to them (to eliminate edge warping and so on, as mentioned above) and that this somehow precludes them from being affected as part of another smart action.

Am I correct, and is there any way around this? It is very frustrating and limiting.

Thanks in advance.

[biglogan]

... quick side note, I just noticed that the forum is cropping my reference image. please excuse the oversite, this is my first time posting an image here. if you right click and "view image" or "open image in new tab" etc, then you will see it properly.

[Víctor Paredes]

It's hard to see in the image, but I think your smart actions are not done correctly.
- You need two actions: one for the bone rotating to left, another for the bone rotating to the right.
- Neutral position is the position your rig has on frame zero. There's no need to key it inside an smart action.
- Inside the smart action, the smart bone must have only one rotation key. That key can be on frame 1, if your smart action lasts only one frame; Or, if your action lasts more than one frame, on the last frame you will animate for that action.

So, here's how you should make it (in my opinion):
- Create an action for the fist movement. The action has the exact same name the smart bone has.
- Inside the action, go to frame 120 and rotate the smart bone to the right until it gets the angle constraint.
(The frame number is not so important, but it's good to have a lot of inbetweens, so 119 is a good amount of them).
- Now, in the same frame 120, rotate the bones of the hand and move the points you want to get the "fist" position.
- Play your animation to check how it's working.
- Don't touch the smart bone again. Remember, to make smart action work, it's necessary to have only one rotation key for that bone.
- If you need it, create some keyframes inbetween for the hand. For example, if the hand is not looking good on frame 60, move the bones or point to fix it on that frame. You can repeat that process on any frame you want (between 1 and 120).
- Now go back to the Mainline and test your smart bone. It should be working from neutral to fist position.

- To make the "extended open" movement, you need to create a new action. This second action will have the same name of the first one, but with an space and a two ( 2).
So, if your smart bone is called "Hand" (sorry, I can't read the real name the bone has), the first action will be named "Hand" and the second one, "Hand 2".
- Inside the second action, go to frame 120 and rotate the bone to the other side (to the left, in this example)
- On the same frame 120, move the other bones and points to get the movement you want
- If it's needed, create some keys inbetween
- Once you are ready, go back to the mainline and test the smart bone. It should be working for both movements.

[biglogan]

hey Selgin, thanks for the input!

my only counter-point is that I've done multi-key smart actions many times with no problems at all, even in this file. That being said, you never know! I've also never tried to use the automatic smart dial feature, so maybe I'll give that a shot too! There are enough whacky little things in this software that that may just work.

That being said, I'm still curious to know more about the relationships between smart actions. i.e. can you not make a smart action that includes a bone that already has it's own smart action?

[Nicohk92]

My experience is that you can, but there are things to look out for and I always get mixed up.

So I'll be following that thread cause I would love a straight answer on that, the kind Selgin just gave for the hand movement.