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Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2024 12:08 am
by TheLion
I am creating a facial rig for a cat.

I created multiple smart bone actions to create facial emotions.
Inside the action I animated the eyes to move downwards, however when I move the associated smart bone inside the "Main Line" channel, it doesn't move the eyes downwards, while the remaining action animation is animated correctly.
I tried deleting all other actions that use the eyes position, to check weather it is because of that, but it does not change anything.
On a side note, I used the layer transform tool for the movement, but using the Transform points tool didn't work either when I tried.

Why is this happening? What are reasons why this could be happening?

Here is the animation when running it inside the action cannel called "evil". The eyes are moving slightly downwards towards the nose:
Image

Here it is when I move the associated smart bone "evil" inside the main channel. The eyes are not moving down:
Image

Re: Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2024 3:05 am
by synthsin75
My first guess would be that a bone or bones in the face bone layer are interfering with the smart bones reaching the eyes.
Any intervening bone will stop a smart bone from reaching lower layers.

Re: Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2024 2:42 pm
by TheLion
(Sorry I couldn't reply earlier because of an issue with my PC).
synthsin75 wrote: Wed Sep 25, 2024 3:05 am Any intervening bone will stop a smart bone from reaching lower layers.
How can I check for intervening bones?
I deleted all the other smart bones and only kept one smart bone (the "evil" emotion smart bone, which moves the eyes) to test it, and it is still not working. (Side note: all the other remaining smart bone actions you see in the list are moving the body and completely unrelated to the facial rig)

I also deleted all keyframes in any other action that change the eyes position and it is still not working.
The "evil" smart bone is a bone on the "Beluga Full Body" bone layer, which changes multiple smart bones on the child bone layer "Beluga face", which themselves are all smart bones.

Here you see the "evil" parent smart bone:
Image

Here you see the child smart bones, including "tension creases":
Image

The only child smart bone that changes the eye position now is the one called "tension creases".
It should be noted that when I move the parent bone "evil" in the Mainline it does not work, but when I move the child bone "tension creases" it works and the eye position changes.

However I noticed something else peculiar:
When I keyframe the "tension creases" smart bone, it automatically adds a keyframe on frame 18. Selecting and deleting that keyframe does not work.
https://i.imgur.com/U063ChX.mp4

How else can I test/ figure out where the issues come from?
Could this be a bug because I imported the base project from Moho 12 into Moho 14?
Is Moho 14 really this buggy and I should have maybe remained on version 12?

Re: Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2024 3:35 pm
by synthsin75
Any bones in a layer, between your controlling smart bone layer and the layer you want to control will interfere.
For example:

Main bone layer
- bone layer (no bones)
- - switch layer (with bones) <---- this interferes with smart bones in the main bone layer from influencing layers within
- - - vector layer <----- main bone layer smart bones can't influence this layer
- - vector layer <---- since there's no bone in the bone layer, the main bone layer smart bones can influence this layer

Re: Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 12:52 pm
by TheLion
Ok, I understand.
In my case I have to add the entire eye movement via a smart bone on the child smart bone layer, and then inside the parent smart bone layer only affect the child layer smart bones, not the layers within the child layer.
(The automatic keyframes I mentioned were probably only because the cursor was on frame 18 when I deleted the other bones for testing).
It works now, thank you very much for your help!

Re: Smartbone action: animation movement does not show inside mainline channel

Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 12:12 am
by synthsin75
Glad I could help. :wink: