bones and reference layers

[superonIII]

heyhey me again being dim about not knowing absolutely everything
so i made a test file to see if things work how i thought and it worked superbly.. i then went ahead and reproduced this on a large-scale and committed hundreds of layers as references, things get a bit jerky i figure i can handle how slow to handling becomes as long as the rest is simpler but apparently somewhere somehow it doesn't work.
the points still animate from the referenced layers but the bones don't appear to have any say whatsoever over what's going on:/
example of this is the eyes layers, a bone is supposed to control their position so the eyes layers are bound to that bone, i've done a head-lunge whilst blinking (the blink is simply made by closing the lids with the points), the original layer lunges and blinks but the reference layers just blink.

pls help, i feel like i've nearly reached the end of my brain again

[hayasidist]

... no images -- getting a photobucket "3rd party hosting has been temporarily disabled - bandwidth exceeded" placeholder instead.

[superonIII]

... no images -- getting a photobucket "3rd party hosting has been temporarily disabled - bandwidth exceeded" placeholder instead.

ahhh, well, it was just an image to help to "illustrate" the situation incase my explanation in words was a failure, if the image is required in this situation i feel and extended post coming on:/

how's that?

[hayasidist]

first one's good - second one (http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa27 ... /baged.gif) still not.

let me try to understand your problem:

you have a bone group layer with bones.
in the group are vector layers
- the face
- the eyes; and this layer is bound to a bone

You animate this group, using bone motion / rotation, along with point motion in the eye layer

then you copy by reference the bone group; and in the copy, the point motion works but the bone movement doesn't?

is that what you're saying?

(in a quick and dirty test here - bone group with 2 child layers and a simple 3 bone set up - all works as expected in both the base and the reference)

Did you intentionally change some elements of the reference copy? Have you tried "sync all channels to original"? what colour is the arrow on the copy?... are you able to share the moho file (or at least enough of it to allow de-bugging)?

[superonIII]

first one's good - second one (http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa27 ... /baged.gif) still not.

let me try to understand your problem:

you have a bone group layer with bones.
in the group are vector layers
- the face
- the eyes; and this layer is bound to a bone

You animate this group, using bone motion / rotation, along with point motion in the eye layer

then you copy by reference the bone group; and in the copy, the point motion works but the bone movement doesn't?

is that what you're saying?

(in a quick and dirty test here - bone group with 2 child layers and a simple 3 bone set up - all works as expected in both the base and the reference)

Did you intentionally change some elements of the reference copy? Have you tried "sync all channels to original"? what colour is the arrow on the copy?... are you able to share the moho file (or at least enough of it to allow de-bugging)?

ye i think you're understanding, not sure about the "then you copy by reference the bone group; and in the copy, the point motion works but the bone movement doesn't?" part, what's confusing me here is i've created the reference layers before binding everything to the bones... am i supposed to be doing this in a different order or copying reference layers (seems counter-intuitive to me)? am i supposed to copy the bone layer/s too?

i don't know what that second image is even doing there photo bucket is doing something strange with the copy link option it seems.
i have updated all layers, infact the only way i could get the initial movement to work was to update them at every keyframe which means i may as well have not made references of the in the first place
not sure about what the colour of the bone has to do with anything either it is standard uncoloured red.

i have created a file which just includes the bare minimal amount to explain hopefully what i'm attempting.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i2cth0s5gydos86/bl3.moho?dl=0

[hayasidist]

oh well, that's pretty straightforward.

first up - I asked about the colour of the "arrow" on the copy -- not the colour of the bone. The arrows on the copied layers are red - and that means "not syncd to original"

the two groups eye1 and eye2 are outside the bone layer (layer5) [and at the same nesting depth in "basic mask"] so the bones in layer5 will have no influence over vectors in those eye groups.

Inside each eye group - all the layers seem to be copies by reference of the one layer "eye" in layer5

I'll note that you've used animated styles - but these channels don't seem to be syncd either?!

In eye, the shape that is "lids" is at the bottom of the shape stack (and so is occluded by other shapes).

===

What I'd have probably done (there are other approaches!) is to have made "blink" a smartbone action and, unless you wanted the eyes to be able to move independently, just done everything inside layer5 (with the mask below the eyes layer). (oh - and - changed the stacking order of the shapes in eye ofc so the lids are above the eyeball etc!)

hope that helps - do say if there's something that you need explained in more detail.