identifying bones in the timeline

[p8guitar]

When animating layers, only the keyframes that belong to the currently selected layer are shown in the timeline. But when animating bones, all keyframes of all bones are shown all the time, or am I missing something? How do you keep track which keyframe in the timeline represents which bone movement? Do you color the dots in the timeline and the bones with the same color, or is there another trick to identify the bone that belongs to a keyframe?

[synthsin75]

Colored bones have their own animation channels.

[Greenlaw]

99% of the time, you only need to pay attention to the top white row channels and the red row channels immediately below.

The top white rows shows you the keyframes for all the bones in the Bone layer. This is mainly useful for making global timing adjustments to that bone layer. (For example, to speed up or slow down the character.)

The red rows are for editing the currently selected bone(s). Use this to monitor and edit the bones you're currently animating.

The other color Bone channels can usually be ignored. As a matter of fact, I like to disable them entirely from the timeline. There's more about this in this video (scrub to 8:54): Better Default Settings for Moho Pro

Other channels in the Bone layer are mainly for transforming the layer. Note: I like to put the Bones layer inside a Group layer and do my layer transforms on the group layer. This isn't necessary but sometimes it's convenient to keep these keyframes separated. (For me, the Group transforms are usually for secondary animation, like adding squash and stretch when the character is running.)

If you need to see channels for multiple layers (bones, artwork or whatever,) all at once, you should use Timeline Visibility in the Layers window--that's the column with the Stopwatch over it. Activating this on a layer makes the layer's active channels persist in the Timeline even when that layer is not selected. This is useful when you have keyframes in multiple layers that need to be edited in sync with each other. (BTW, Stan's Layer Selection Buttons offers a convenient way to access Timeline Visibility without drilling down the layers.)

In general, I try to minimize what I see in the timeline to only what I'm currently working on. Displaying too many keyframes at once is confusing and can slow down Moho's UI performance.

Hope this helps.

[hayasidist]

or this script that will select the bones (or points) https://www.mediafire.com/file/yidx32gv ... d.zip/file in a given keyframe. The zip has a readme plus script and icon - those need to go in your custom folder /scripts/tools

[p8guitar]

or this script that will select the bones (or points) https://www.mediafire.com/file/yidx32gv ... d.zip/file in a given keyframe. The zip has a readme plus script and icon - those need to go in your custom folder /scripts/tools

Cool, this is very helpful, nice!
First I thought the coloured bones will be a good guide what's happening, but as Greenlaw already wrote, the timeline becomes cluttered very quickly. Maybe I will just have one coloured bone active that I use a lot and for everything else either select a bone and look which keyframes appear in the timeline or use the script.
Thank you all for your answers! I really appreciate you friendly helpful people here

[Greenlaw]

First I thought the coloured bones will be a good guide what's happening, but as Greenlaw already wrote, the timeline becomes cluttered very quickly. Maybe I will just have one coloured bone active that I use a lot and for everything else either select a bone and look which keyframes appear in the timeline or use the script.

That's probably a good idea. Obviously too much information in the timeline isn't helpful, but I don't want to imply that color bone channels are completely useless. If you can use them, definitely do so.

For the way I work, color bone channels haven't been necessary. For bones keyframes, I really do look only at the global and current selection channels even when working with complicated rigs and projects. I do use bone colors in the workspace to differentiate Left and Right side bones, or to simply to improve bone visibility against a character's fill colors or textures. But having separate channels in the timeline for these colors hasn't been useful to me since I'm already getting that information from the Current Selection channels.

But now that I've said that, I'm sure I'm going to run into a situation where I need to use this feature any day now.