Moho Forum

I was in the process of making 4 smart bones for a character to move his upper and lower eyelids and widen and narrow his eyes. All art was vector, and I used angle constraints to limit the bone rotation. All the bones were working and looking decent and I was trying to improve the movements by moving a few points here and there.

But then I did something unfortunate and wrecked a couple of the bones. Then I wrecked the other bones. The bones stopped rotating with the manipulate bone tool. The bones translated instead, which seems weird.

I'm not sure what I did to wreck them. Can I get a list of all the ways a person can ruin a smart bone?

I already deleted the bones, but I'd like to know what I should avoid doing in the future. Thanks.

My guess is that you accidentally keyframed the bones moving in one of the smart actions.
Don't know of it would cause what you're seeing, but reparenting smart bones after their actions are made is usually a bad idea.

synthsin75 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 2:07 am My guess is that you accidentally keyframed the bones moving in one of the smart actions.
Don't know of it would cause what you're seeing, but reparenting smart bones after their actions are made is usually a bad idea.

I might've done the keyframe thing. Now I wish I didn't delete the bones so I could check. But I'm sure I didn't reparent bones.

I moved smart bones to better spots in the workspace.

I changed the angle constraints on a smart bone.

I used UNDO maybe 20 or so times - in a row. That might've been the last sketchy thing I did before the wreckage occurred.

I think I renamed a smart bone, too.

Lastly, I deleted a couple actions by mistake and tried to undelete them.

In the future, I will endeavor to create flawless smart bone actions first try, rather than employ my usual chaotic method of art-making.

Yeah, if you repositioned them while in a smart bone action, that'd do it.
Changing angle constraints isn't usually too bad, but it could confuse things.
Renaming a smart bone will kill it's connection to the smart bone action, unless you rename the action to match.

Hoptoad wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 2:34 am In the future, I will endeavor to create flawless smart bone actions first try, rather than employ my usual chaotic method of art-making.

Even better, you should save incremental versions of your projects. This way, when something goes wrong, you can fall back on an earlier version. I may keep dozens of versions of a project, rare cases a hundred or more. For each version, I add a number to the filename. For example: s001_anim_001.moho, s001_anim_002.moho, etc. I try to save a new version any time I complete a significant amount of work in the project, and I rarely lose more than 10-30 minutes of work this way.

The numbered files are kept in a WIP folder inside a scene folder, and I save one unnumbered copy of the latest version in that folder for rendering. (This is because Moho Exporter has the annoying problem of using the filename for output, and when it adds changing version number to the rendered files, it breaks our comps. I really wish I could set a preferred output filename and destination in Moho's Project Settings like I can in many other animation programs. Ok...stepping off the soapbox now.)

When I have 10 or so versions of a project in the WIP folder it starts to get cluttered so I start moving older versions into an _old folder. (the underscore forces this folder to the top of the folder list.) I keep every version of a project until the production is done, and then I'll delete the _old folder and probably keep only the most recent versions in case I ever need to return to this production later.

Needless to say, it's a good idea to back up everything nightly to a separate hard drive in case of hardware failure. I like to use Acronis for this, and it backs up my entire network at home every evening to a separate external drive.

This is how I manage project files at home and at work, but at work we also use Window's built-in Previous Versions system, which saves a version every hour and keeps a week's worth for emergency recovery...I can't tell you how many times this system has saved my butt at work.

If you're not good about saving incremental backups on your own, Wes wrote a nice script that will do it for you:

SYN Auto Save

If all this sounds like I'm being overly cautious, seriously, I've been around long enough to know that hardware tends to fail at the worst possible time, and I really hate losing time and work.

Hope this helps.

I occasionally back-up my entire project to an external hard drive. And Dropbox is supposed to be backing-up everything. I don't entirely trust Dropbox, though. I remember that you mentioned in a post something about Moho files becoming corrupted on Dropbox. Plus, a couple months ago, a Scrivener project file I had stored on Dropbox years earlier was corrupted and wouldn't open. Fortunately, I managed to find the original file on my old computer and it opened fine.

I do need to start backing-up all in-progress Moho files on my hard drive, though.

(Beat)

There. . .I saved my in-progress character rig with a 001 extension, as back-up. Yay.