Overriding the Smart Bones Action In Main Timeline Animation

[shubi]

Hi,
I have created a smart bone action for a character's face and it works fine in main animation. But the problem comes when i try to make changes to the final look of the frame. For example i can create a frame with rotated face with help of smart bone.

Now i want to make changes to the eye lid but even if i click on it, it gets disfigured. (Image attached for reference). I am guessing its because of the smart bones, so can i not override this behavior? I want to use the smart bones to create the basic postures with ease, and then make detail changes manually.

https://ibb.co/8B4Hh8j

[Greenlaw]

Normally, you should be able to animate the points after using a Smart Bone to move the points. For example, I routinely use the Magnet tool to reshape a mouth drawing or eye shape when the character needs to strike an unplanned pose.

When the points move erratically or otherwise refuse to be edited on the mainline, I might suspect you have multiple Smart Bone Actions that are conflicting, or the active Smart Bone Action has keyframe conflicts within itself.

Another possibility: Are you using Bezier Curves? That can cause also unexpected behavior when they're not keyframed properly. As a general rule of them, I just avoid using Bezier Curves inside a Smart Bone Action animation and use regular Moho points instead.

If you can post the file, I'm sure someone here can take a look at it. (I'm a bit busy today but possibly can check after work.)

Edit: I just noticed you have a head turn Smart Bone Dial (SBD). I'm guessing your sliding the eyes' point animation horizontally inside this SBD, and this is probably the cause of the conflict. It's better to have the eye artwork in its own layer and simply slide the eye layer inside the action. The 'eye close' animation can be in a separate Eye Close SBD. When I do this, I don't actually slide the layer, instead I bind the eyes art or layers to a Face or Eyes' bone parented to the head bone, and slide that in the head turn SBD.

Either way, the point is to not animate the points directly inside the head turn but instead slide the layer or bind the layer or points to a separate bone and move the bone instead. This should prevent the directional conflict you're seeing when editing the points on the Mainline.

Anyway, that's my best guess for this situation. Hope it helps.

[shubi]

Thank you very much for the insight Greenlaw,
It seems its both the bezier curves and the point movement animation that is causing the issue. I am able to make the bezier points fixed, and it helps but still there are some off points, so i guess will create new model from scratch.

Although i could not understand how to use moho points instead of bezier, for example if i need to create any curvy shape like the face or a bean, don't i need to use those handles to define the curvature?

[hayasidist]

Although i could not understand how to use moho points instead of bezier, for example if i need to create any curvy shape like the face or a bean, don't i need to use those handles to define the curvature?

Moho's "ordinary" points have a "curvature" [the tool standard shortcut for that is C]. It's usually set to somewhere between 0 (pointy) and about 0.4 ("circle") although you can set numbers outside that range (-1 to 1 inclusive).

so, to make the eye lid shape you could choose to have the bottom corner points as "peaked" (0) and the rest "smooth" (0.3). "Under the hood" Moho actually uses a Bezier algorithm to plot the path.

As such, it's rare to need to directly edit the Bezier handles for points on the sort of basic shapes that I see in your screenshots

[Greenlaw]

Although i could not understand how to use moho points instead of bezier, for example if i need to create any curvy shape like the face or a bean, don't i need to use those handles to define the curvature?

Not at all. Check out my 2019 demo reel. All the character animation in the Boss Baby footage I worked on used regular Moho points, not Bezier points.

When working with regular Moho points, you may need to add extra points and plot them a little differently to create the same curve shapes. To adjust the curves, select the curvature tool and drag L/R over the points to adjust their curvature. Before we had Bezier, this was the only way to work precisely in Moho.

To be clear, I do use Bezier points when I think it's appropriate and when I don't think it will hinder the rig. In general, I like to use Bezier for non-deforming items, and tend to stick with regular points for deforming items. To me, it's more predictable to use regular points when I'm morphing between shapes.

Most of the time, I use the Hide Handles options so I don't accidentally activate Bezier mode, which is really easy to do even when you're careful. (Tip: look up Synthsin75's Curvature Tool mod...this tool adds the Bezier tools options to this tool so you can enable/disable them from there.) If you do accidentally activate Bezier mode by mistake, you can reset the point by selecting it and clicking on the Smooth or Sharp buttons. (Tip #2: If you use my MQC tool, these buttons are available all the time, not only when you're using the Curvature tool.)

That said, it's possible to use Bezier points in a deforming rig and inside Actions. If you do a search in these forums, you can find some tips by Victor for working with Bezier points in animation. (Sorry, I don't have the link handy atm. If I have time later, I can look it up and update this post.)

Hope this helps.

[shubi]

Got it. Thank you for the explanation.