Moho Forum

Hi,

I must be missing something here; after drawing a curve with the Sketch Bones tool the generated bones start at the right spot but end way off with a heavy offset [Please see video below].

How can I use the tool to create bones at the exact locations of the curve? (What am I missing here?)

Two possible sources of error:
- check that layer's Z depth. It should be 0.
- sometimes you get erratic behaviour because the layer's origin is way off. Reset the layer position, or the origin point.

I think the best thing to do is draw-through the final destination point. It seems to work better that way. You can then delete any excess.

slowtiger wrote: ↑Wed Jul 12, 2023 2:32 pm Two possible sources of error:
- check that layer's Z depth. It should be 0.
- sometimes you get erratic behaviour because the layer's origin is way off. Reset the layer position, or the origin point.

Thanks. I checked the Z, but it is 0. Also the layer's origins are still the same (why should it mess up the draw tool tho. I would expect moho to do the conversion to local space underwater tho so we don't need to think about origins when drawing bones, right?)

SimplSam wrote: ↑Wed Jul 12, 2023 2:34 pm I think the best thing to do is draw-through the final destination point. It seems to work better that way. You can then delete any excess.

Thanks. I tried that, but it's still the same

Hi mmmaarten,

Hmm...that's very strange. I use Sketch Bones all the time for creating and animating bone chains and have never see that happen. Just to be sure, here's a test I made a few minutes ago...


I'm curious but can you check your Windows Scaling setting? I find that if the setting is not set to an increment of 100% there might be UI offset issues in Moho. If your setting is at, say, 125% or 150%, try setting it to 100% or 200% and see if that fixes the problem.

Update:

I played around with Sketch Bones a little more this morning and was able to get a small offset to occur, but I couldn't do this consistently and I'm not sure what I did differently to cause that. ATM, I'm seeing the correct behavior and can't get it to do the offset. Will continue to look into this later.

Another update:

My Windows Display Scaling was set to 100% and I changed it to 125% and 150% to see what happens, and it made no difference. Sketch Bones was accurately drawing bones along the sketched line most of the time. (BTW, 150% is the 'recommended' setting but I dropped it down to 100% because 150% is actually too big for my laptop screen.)

Sketch Bones did create 1 off-set result in about 15 tries before I stopped testing. I'm not sure what was different about that one time, and Moho was very accurate the other 14 times. ATM, I feel the one offset result was a random glitch.

I also tried different Workspace zoom levels but this made no difference.

So, I'm still not sure why you're consistently getting that offset result. If I have time, I'll look into this further tonight after work.

Other things you can try:

Try adjusting the bone length value. Does making it smaller or larger improve anything?

How about when you use a different Bone Display Width setting? (Mine is set to Medium.)

If you're using a tablet and pen, try updating the drivers.

Hope this helps.

This next tip isn't related to the offset problem but it's helpful for rigging drawing for Sketch Bones animation.

When I'm setting up something very flexible, like a tail or tentacles, I'll draw the item in a straight line rather than posed (i.e, curled like the tail in your dragon). This way, when I use Sketch Bones, the deformation will look good when curled in both directions and in squiggly shapes.

When the drawing is pre-posed before rigging, the deformations will look pretty bad when you bend the shape against the existing curve.

I recommend this not just for tails and tentacles but also rope, chains, hair, etc...anything long drawing that needs a lot of flexibility during animation.

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 6:50 pm ...

Hi Greenlaw, I'd read your very helpful posts, but so far didn't have much time to dive into this further. I can say tho that I didn't have the issue on another project on the same computer. If I have more time to test this I'll let you know