Can't figure out a wonky leg

[REngland]

I'm pretty new to Moho, and have been working hard to educate myself, but I've been stumped by these issues for weeks.

1) I have a cat whose leg insists on rotating in the timeline, but it doesn't in the action area.
You'll see in the video a demonstration of this, and how even the tail goes funky when on the normal timeline.

-Layers are binded with the point method
-no bones have strength
-No individual layers have animation
-in a different file, I cleared all the other actions and dials... nothing changed.
-both thigh bones have arc IK solver, and the box below it checked, I wondered if that could be causing problems, but both legs aren't doing this.

2) The arms were originally under the top half of the jacket, but then the arm could never go over the jacket. Is there a way to make them work both under and over at the same time? I don't know if masking could help with something like that. I tried reference layer, but that just gave me the same result as you see now.
Just hoping I don't have to go through each frame and fix the arms.

Thanks for any help. I really like moho, and really want to learn how to use well.
** and yes, I know I need to fix those ears! Moved the layers instead of the bones. doh!

zipped up the file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GYDUnk ... iTkhXX7-0/

[Hoptoad]

I'm still learning smart bone actions, so I still make mistakes. That being said...

If I was looking for a problem like yours, I would go into the action and select one bone at a time and look on the timeline for any unwanted keyframes and delete them. My suspicion is an unwanted keyframe happened by mistake. Maybe when you moved one bone, a second bone was also selected and moved a tiny bit and you didn't notice.

When I see problems like that, I tend to go on a bad keyframe hunt.

[Daxel]

I opened your file and I don't know exactly what happens with that leg, so I just selected the 4 bones of that leg, deleted the keyframes, did the animation again and now it works. But I would like to know what happened. Maybe someone more can look into it.

About the arm: if you want a drawing to be over and under another drawing, you need to separate that drawing in two parts. You can either separate your arm in two layers (arm, forearm) and use layer order to place them over and under the other drawing, or you can use the reference technique to keep the arm in a single layer but divided in two shapes (arm and forearm) to be able to keyframe the visibility (changing its color alpha) of one of the shapes (in this case the arm) in a reference layer that you can place on top of the other drawing (the top of the jacket) without the arm shape ocluding it. There are a lot of posts and videos about layer order and references that you can find better if you use google instead of the search bar of this site. Write site:lostmarble.com at the start of your google search.

[MrMiracle77]

A somewhat less likely possibility is that the wrong rotation direction is assigned to the leg. If a bone doesn't have rotation limits, Moho will sometimes interpret the wrong rotation direction.

I've honestly only ever had this happen once in one of my rigs.

[Greenlaw]

Another thought: when working with Smart Bone Actions, the rotation values can change if a Smart Bone has been unparented and then reparented. This can potentially break the keyframes in the action, and when this happens I find it’s easier to delete and recreate the keys. Since I’m only rekeying a couple of rotation keyframes, it’s no big deal.

When I’m doing this to move a Smart Bone to a different project or to another character, to prevent the rotation error I make sure to include its parent bone when I copy it so the rotation value is maintained when I reparent the bone.

Hope this helps.

[REngland]

Thank you for the responses! What a head scratcher this was.
I'll do what you did first Daxel, redo the dang leg!
And thank you Greenlaw, maybe I did reparent it at some point (it didn't always do that flip).

And I love the idea of using layer references, a split arm, and using alpha transparency on one of the shapes to pull off that arm issue. Can't wait to play with that today.

[SimplSam]

Following on from Daxel's post - I deleted the last Rotation keyframe for R Lower Leg in Body Turn and it started working.

I think the real issue is you are trying to set the angle of R Lower Leg in the Smart Action - whilst having that same bone set to target R Foot Target: which normally does not allow you to set angles (or overrides them).

I think Moho got confused with the Smart Action vs Target conflict and didn't know what to do.

p.s. Very interesting 2.5d rigging you have there. I like the way you can turn the bones and then use them in the new dimension plane.

[REngland]

Thank you for digging into that! I can see how I scrambled things up with the target bone, I definitely don’t want to make mistakes like that again.

I’m a little ambitious with that rig, as a beginner. Thanks for the compliment. I wanted to be able to do 360 degree spins! This will be a dancing kitty.
Next time.

[Hoptoad]

Following on from Daxel's post - I deleted the last Rotation keyframe for R Lower Leg in Body Turn and it started working.

Ha! I knew it. "Wonky leg" made me think bad keyframe before even watching the video.

Congrats on finding the problematic keyframe, SimplSam.

Is it just me, but do you guys enjoy solving odd problems in your animations? I know I do. As long as solving them doesn't take too long, of course. That's frustrating.