bone dial issue - snaps back to old location

[tiatridis]

I have this rig I have been working on. I have made bone dials to for instance rotate the head to the left and the right. I had them placed sort of randomly while working on them figuring I would line them up later. They work fine, aren't parented. If I use the transform bone tool to move the dials off to the side more (on frame 0) they seem fine but...when I then use the manipulate bone tool to for instance rotate the head, once I start moving the bone in the bone dial it suddenly moves across the page into a new position. It works in that position. This happens on frame 0 or out in the timeline on any other frame. If I toggle back and forth between the timeline and frame 0, the move back to where I put them in frame 0 but still continue to shift in the same manner when used. Curiously if I manipulate just one bone dial it moves to its old position, but if I manipulate more then one or one twice they move to new positions off to the right. I must be missing something, any ideas? Much appreciated. There is an alternate tail that's not visible in the screen grabs by the way, but the sketch bones are. I thought maybe it had something to do with that as it was the step before but removing the alt tail makes no difference.

[chucky]

I would check your smart actions.
First select the offending bone and see if any of the actions that should have anything to do with that bone are highlighted with that bone selected.

If they are then the bone may have been accidentally moved in the action.
Reset it's position in the action and it should all be good.

[tiatridis]

The bones don't move during the action other than the pivot as you move along the timeline. When I click on any of these bones in the timeline it does highlight the action in the actions palette but then the same thing happens in all the Moho supplied tutorial rigs so that's normal. No idea what's going on, and other ideas?

[tiatridis]

Well I decided to do a test and rig the bone dials from scratch and they worked, so probably not worth trying to figure the issue out really. Thanks for the suggestion though, much appreciated.

[Greenlaw]

I agree with Chucky...this totally sounds like an unintended keyframe in the Smart Bone Action. It happens.

FYI, there are a number of reasons that can cause this to happen, and most can be avoided once you understand how they occur.

One of the less obvious ones is when a Smart Bone Dial (SBD) that was parented to another bone gets unparented. This changes the local rotation values of the bone which can break the Smart Bone Action. This is easy enough to fix but you need to know where to look and why it happened.

Careless use of Freeze Pose is another one that occasionally messes me up. It's totally fine to use this command to hold a pose in the Mainline but you should absolutely avoid using it when working inside a Smart Bone Action because it can keyframe all of the other SBDs in the layer and lock them.

[tiatridis]

Thanks, things to look out for moving forward. Finally getting it all down I think. The forum members here are super helpful!

[Greenlaw]

Cool! Yeah, we've all been there...just trying to minimize the hurt for others.

BTW, for pupils, I personally find it a lot easier to just bind them to bones and then animate the bones directly. Controlling the movement of pupils using multiple Smart Bone Dials isn't easier and it can even be awkward to animate smoothly.

Here are some typical setups I like to use...



This is a basic setup that I use in most rigs. The pupils each have their own bone so I can animate them independently, and there is a shared bone I can animate to move them both together. This third bone is there for convenience because it's easier to select when there are many bones on the face, but it's really not necessary. Overall, I think this simple setup gives you a lot more posing possibilities than using Smart Bones, and it's just a lot easier to rig and animate with.

Now, when the face does get too cluttered with bones or when the bones are too tiny to select and animate, then it's time to add remote bones to control the pupils. Like so...



In this setup, the pupilR and pupilL bones are position-constrained to follow pupil R and pupil L. Optionally, I can rotation-constrain them, which is useful with certain iris designs. Once this is set up, I use the Shy Bone option to hide the bones on the artwork, so it looks like this during animation...



Animating this way takes a few minutes to get used to but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy. One BIG advantage to this comes when you're setting up a turning character and you need to switch to a profile drawing of the character. If you're using only the bones inside the face to animate with, the positions of the bones will not match the new artwork's pupils, but when you use the remote pupil bones to animate with and hide the actual pupil bones with Shy Bone, this means you can have multiple sets of actual pupil bones for different head angles, and control them with the single remote pupil bones. This is more efficient for complex rigs and it's still easier to animate with.

Smart Bones is a powerful feature and it's been one of the top reasons I prefer using Moho for puppet animations, but it can be overkill for the simple stuff.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Of course, if you're using Moho 13.5.2, another way to deal with the profile issue is to use the new Vitruvian Bones system.

[tiatridis]

Cool, thanks for the advice!