Issues with Animated Layer Order

[Ryanryan]

So I am using smart bones to do a character rotation/turn. The body portion worked fine and the animated order adjusts just fine. However when I try to edit the "Ear" layers of my head in the smart bone action, the layers appear to be locked and do not allow me to move them up or down. Whenever I attempt to move them it does still create a keyframe, but nothing actually moves or changes.

The layer in question is within a group within a bone layer, but I have enabled animated layer ordering in both layers. Any idea what might be causing the issue?

[synthsin75]

If one smart bone is already trying to alter layer order, no other layer reordering can be done. You'll probably need to group parts in a way that you can have separate layer ordering.

[Greenlaw]

I'm not sure if this is what's happening but I've found that using Animated Layer Order inside a Smart Bone action will override any layer order animations you want to do on the normal timeline. Because of this, I tend to avoid doing that unless I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to manually change the layer order during animation.

FYI, some other types of animations using Smart Bones, like bones animations, can sort of be over-ridden. Actually, you'll be animating additively to the bones controlled by the Smart Bones. Sometimes I find this fights what I actually need to do for a character in a given scene and I have to remove the Smart Bone action and animate manually.

Most of the time, a well considered Smart Bone action can really speed up the animation process but sometimes you may run into situations where the same Smart Bone setups can work against you. If I'm dealing with this frequently, I may create two versions of rig, one for general use and one for special cases.

Edit: Oh, yeah, plus what synthsin75 said.

[Ryanryan]

Thank you for the responses! Having two rigs does seem like a very intelligent idea. I'll probably just end up doing a layer visibility switch since the smart bones are giving me trouble.