Smart Bones Head Turn. Works In Action Menu But Not In Main

[drumlug13]

-I rigged a Head Turn with Smart Bones using the red highlighted bone above the character's head.
- "The Head Turn Bone" is located in the Bone Layer titled "Head"
- When I rotate the Head Turn Bone in the Action Menu, the head layers rotate along with it.
- When I'm in the Mainline. I can rotate the same Head Bone but the head layers will not rotate.

- I've tried treating it as a Blend Morph and making all the movements on frame 1 inside the Action Menu as well as treating it like a Smart Bone animation and moving the keys further down the Actions timeline. Both methods will create the head turn inside the Action Menu but still neither will work on the Mainline.

- I know that Smart Bones can't control vectors that are inside another Group/Bone Layer, that's why I put the Head Turn Bone inside the Head Bone Layer. It should work shouldn't it? I made some simpler animations with the same setup (Bone Layer inside Bone Layer) and was able to animate the vectors in Action and Mainline. Not exactly sure what I'm doing wrong with the character here.

[funksmaname]

Hey man,
Most obvious mistake might be that in the actual action you haven't rotated the controlling bone at all?

Can't think of anything else off hand, but if you want to pm me a link to the file I can take a look at it for you...

[funksmaname]

I looked at your file - and the problem is that the layer is 'layer bound' to the bone - which cancels the point motion.
If you click 'release layer' it works, and if you want all points on a layer bound to the angle bone, just point bind all points to that bone instead of layer binding.

I'm not sure why this is, but it's something to keep in mind.
(one little givaway is that the layers that have red dots are 'flash optimised' - which basically means they have no point motion and would export as a single 'clip' that just has layer translation which can go to flash without frame by frame file size bloating - if the red dot is there, it's probably layer bound and smart bones won't effect it)

[drumlug13]

Do'h I knew it had to be something like that.

thanks Funk! You the man

[drumlug13]

Hey Sir Funk.... I hit another snag... pm'd another file if you get a chance to check it out.

I've released the layers and made a few adjustments. It's working, with the exception of the 2 layers of hair. Same issue, they move in the Actions Menu but not in the Mainline.

The difference with the hair layers is that I do have some points bound to bones so I can get some physics animation in the hair. I've tried release layer, to see what happened (obviously nothing since I have individual points bound)

Is there a fix for this one or am I at a point where I have to choose between the bones animating hair movement for me, or having the hair move along with the Smart Bone Head Turn?

[funksmaname]

Ah I finally understand the issue - and yeah, basically until bone motion is supported you're SOL.
singe the movement of the bones is what moves the hair over, that will be ignored in the main time line... the only way around it would be to use blend morphs which actually put down keys and therefore support the bone motion.

A halfway house could be to create a blend morph that sets the main smart bone over, as well as moving the hair bones. This should rotate the bone as you blend in the morph and only key the bits that SBs don't support... but yeah, unfortunately if you need to move the bone position you can't do it with SBAs.

tbh the best solution would be to sacrafice the bone dynamics imo. If you really want that secondary motion you could do it with a smart bone of its own, or manually if it doesn't happen all that often. It's a bit more manual labour but hey, it works!

[drumlug13]

Yeah that was kinda the conclusion I was coming to also. Thanks again for digging into this one, I really appreciate your time on it

[drumlug13]

Is there a way to move a Switch Layer as part of a Smart Bone Action or do SL's have the same restrictions?

[funksmaname]

Currently, only point motion, line width and curvature are supported, and only on direct child vector layers. All othe layer types or other animation channels aren't and will have to be controlled by morph blends (or rudigers morph dials, though not sure the lease of that controls switch layers switching, it should support layer translation...)