When Smart bones give you Lemons...

[eric1223]

....you make a German Chocolate Cake.

Everyone probably knows this, but I Just found this out. This may help people who don't know about it.

If you have a complex character, and its rigged with a child bone layer, this might help you. Say that you made the head into that bone layer. Smart bones wouldn't work for the layer the way you would want it to...The bones would work, but everything you do within that layer would go into some other action instead of the SB action.

Rats...

There is a work around for this, and it isn't hard that to do (Oh Who am I kidding, animating is hard work!).

1. First, Just keep finishing your all of your poses for the your smart bones actions. Make sure that you are on the "all" tab on the Action window. If your timeline ever turns grey (mainline), something went wrong. Try to get it done right the first time so that you won't have to go back and do it. I swear, if you mess this up...

2. Next make another smart bone, BUT make it inside of your child bone layer instead of the parent. Set that up with the same angle constraints, start time, finish time...all that. This time, you have to change the name. What I do is put a number right behind the name of it with no space. If you add a space, AS is gonna assume that you meant to apply a different action to the same SB.

3. Now, Make sure you are on that SB new action you just created. Once you are there, go to frame "1"

4. Finally, copy your parent SB action from step "1" into your new SB action. Now everything within that Bone layer will work with smart bones.

But now you have 2 smart bones that could alter your character in ways that you don't want. This is simple to fix. Just keep your parent angle, and your child angle the same. Also, keep your interpolation the same. If you do that, you should be fine.

If you messed up on your poses, just delete step 2 own down, fix the poses, then repeat this all over again.

Welp, hope this helps.

[synthsin75]

Sounds like user error. It would help if you posted an example file with the problem you are trying to fix.

[eric1223]

Sounds like user error. It would help if you posted an example file with the problem you are trying to fix.

About that, check out this thread. If you do, it explains the situation, and a user there explains what is going on.
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=25963

[synthsin75]

Still sounds like user error. And not enough details to sort you out without some example (to see what you are doing wrong).

[dkwroot]

I could be wrong, but I think he's talking about how nested smart bone actions are divided up between point manipulation and bone control when you have bones within nested controlled rigs. Basically, if you have a character that's rigged with bones that have layers bound to them, you have to control layer manipulation locally and then control bone movement from the parent layer. In this sense, the point manipulation and bone manipulation are divided between nested bones and parent bones respectively.

If you want to avoid too much hassle when setting up this kind of rig, you could rig the smart bone actions entirely from the parent layer and then copy the actions into the child bones which is what the OP appears to be saying.

This will inevitably beg the question, "why not just bind everything within child layers to the bones of the parent layers and avoid all the trouble?"
At the heart of the problem is bone clutter, which makes working with heavily rigged characters a nightmare. Until anime studio allows us to put bones into groups and then show/hide those groups at our discretion, people are going to be trying to divide up their bones in rigs to make working with them more manageable.

[synthsin75]

Still sounds like user error. Can no one manage to provide even a simple example of this supposed problem?

[dkwroot]

Still sounds like user error. Can no one manage to provide even a simple example of this supposed problem?

Sure thing, check it out here (I saved with AS 10): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwzk-f ... sp=sharing

You 'could' move layers individually from the parent instead of nested bones, but then you won't be able to use a skeleton. This kind of animation method is especially useful for hands.

[synthsin75]

So he's just talking about relaying smartbone actions down into the nested layer? Yes, you either need to relay smartbone actions through all the intervening bone layers or have no intervening bones (even if there are intervening bone layers) and do everything from the parent layer directly. Maybe that post just sounded more complicated than it was.

Are you talking about having fully rigged hands in a switch? If so, all of those could be controlled by the same parent rig, by relayed smartbone actions. So once you have it setup, you could ignore the nested rigs entirely.

[dkwroot]

So he's just talking about relaying smartbone actions down into the nested layer? Yes, you either need to relay smartbone actions through all the intervening bone layers or have no intervening bones (even if there are intervening bone layers) and do everything from the parent layer directly. Maybe that post just sounded more complicated than it was.

As far as I can tell, yes.

Are you talking about having fully rigged hands in a switch? If so, all of those could be controlled by the same parent rig, by relayed smartbone actions. So once you have it setup, you could ignore the nested rigs entirely.

Yes, I tend to rig hands at various angles and then store them in a switch that I can access from a higher layer. Could you elaborate about using relayed smartbone actions? I'm always looking for a better way to streamline my workflow.

[synthsin75]

Yes, I tend to rig hands at various angles and then store them in a switch that I can access from a higher layer. Could you elaborate about using relayed smartbone actions? I'm always looking for a better way to streamline my workflow.

Sure. Say you have layers something like this:

Main skeleton
- Hand switch
- - Angle 1 bone rig
- - - Angle 1 vectors
- - Angle 2 bone rig
- - - Angle 2 vectors
etc..

The main skeleton layer has a set of hand smartbones. These SB actions control the rigs in the switch, which control their own vectors. Here's a quick example: http://www.filedropper.com/sbswitchriggedhand_1

Just make sure that none of the switch rig bone names match the main skeleton. I just selected all the bones in these layers and gave them a name I knew wouldn't be a smartbone name. You can place the main skeleton fingers wherever you like, that will make them easier to animate. Can't use layer binding though, so the whole chain (arm & hand) can only be controlled by smartbone (hence the extra group layer for arm motion).

[Telemacus]

File no longer available.

[synthsin75]

http://www.filedropper.com/sbswitchriggedhand