Moho Animation Forum

I haven't needed to register on the forums until now because this is the first time I haven't found the answer by searching. Thanks to everyone providing help here it has been a valuable resource and I am extremely grateful. I have been learning animation and using the software for about two months so I am very new to this.

I am working with a cycled walk animation which is saved as an action. I would like to be able to have my character continue the walking action after key-framing a new action such as a wave or a pointing motion. After adding new key-frames, the cycle gets interrupted. I have to reinsert the same walking action reference and try to time it so that it looks smooth and natural. I seem to have accomplished what I am attempting once before but I don't know if it was just perfectly timed or if I got lucky and somehow accomplished what I hope is possible; regardless, I haven't been able to achieve this success again. To put it another way, after the character points, his arm is stuck there. I would like his arm to resume the walking animation after he is finished pointing. I have been trying to achieve this by reinserting a reference to the walk animation (sorry for repeating this, just trying to make it clear.) Auto-freeze keys is not checked.

Most likely you were "just perfectly timed" but you`d be again with a little help of onion skinning.

When inserting a new action reference, you`re always adding the very same set of keys and in order to maintain the smooth movements - do your best to match the preceding pose. Bear in mind that different adjacent interpolations may also interfere with the smoothness. So, deploy onion skinning (checkbox on timeline) and stitch `em all ,)

In something like this I've used 2 bone rigs - one for legs and body, and one for arms. Then I created two walk cycles of same length in each. Doing some waving with the arms now only disrupts one cycle, so I can use the other one as reference to where to start the cycle again.

Thank you for the responses. I figured out that the main issue was rather simple and left me feeling silly. One of my character's walk cycle had a startup that differed very little from the rest of the key-frames. The other had a six frame startup that was practically impossible to blend mid action. Hours of trying to force it before I figured out something so simple!

I am yet to work with the onion skinning other than the quick lesson in the tutorial (inchworm.) The idea of animating a show or movie frame by frame blows my mind. I can't believe people can actually do that. I should keep an open mind to it though as I'm sure there will be a time and place like you have mentioned.

Two bone rigs? That is so clever. I can already see some of the advantages that could have. This forum is the golden goose that keeps on giving, thank you.

I've just been doing this sort of thing and what I did was copied and pasted the action points into the time frame then moved the character however I wanted then continued with the actions after it was finished keeping the same start and finish points so it all went together.

This way you could have a wave with the legs still moving just the same as in the action because you're not touching those bones and it wont break the action because technically it isn't one.