Joint Noodles

[Fonce Falooda]

Okay, what in the world are these, and should they be interfering with me cycling some walking?

(My complete failure to cycle this little stretch of animation could easily turn out to be something else entirely. )

Anyway, what're these? Thanks!

[hayasidist]

animated reparenting.

somewhere in the timeline you've changed the bone parent.

[Greenlaw]

To add to the above comment, you may have created these links by editing your rig (i.e., 'correcting' the bone hierarchy) on a frame other than frame 0.

You can fix this by correcting the bones hierachy at frame 0 and then deleting the Reparent keyframes for the bones downstream in your timeline. The quick way to do this is to select the bones with the 'link' icon in the joints, and then remove the keyframes after the red Parent icon.

[Fonce Falooda]

Haya and Greenlaw- Yep, that was it. When you're learning, you do stuff you don't know NOT to do, and apparently I threw a keyframe on EVERYTHING at frame 1, including Bone Reparenting. Couldn't see what I did because all the timeline layers were consolidated, but when I unchecked that in preferences, my timeline exploded vertically! I quickly realized I didn't need almost all of it, so now everything looks like the tutorials again.

PLUS I got my animation to cycle! I'd put a keyframe right before the one where it repeats (if frames 1 and 25 are the same, I added one at 24), but somehow it didn't apply itself to all the bones so the cycling wasn't happening. I told it to repeat from 25, where everything had a keyframe and it started right up.

And anyone snickering at my faltering first steps in this wacky program should challenge me on my Flash skills. I know how to do neat stuff, just not in this thing yet.

Thanks again, guys!