character layer suddenly can't be animated

[jonathan.reaux]

I have spent two days animating a scene with 3 characters. I opened the file today, and something is wrong with one of the characters. His layer is moving on it's own where there are no keys. When I try to move him back to the correct place, as soon as I leave that frame, he snaps back to a different place, and every time, it's a different place.
At any point I had keyframes on his bones, his whole layer is now moving sporadically, even though there are no keys on his layer, and it cannot be fixed, because I can't remove any keys if they aren't there, and if I try to force his layer to the right spot, he just snaps to a different spot as soon as I move the time slider.
The only thing out of the ordinary I noticed is when I opened the scene file today, I got a warning message saying "File paths used in this project were updated because the referenced items were not found in the original location." However, I made no changes to the files or their locations since I worked on it yesterday. And all the characters and layers are in the scene, there doesn't appear to be anything missing.

Check out the video below to see a demonstration of the issue.

https://www.loom.com/share/126446ce9a38 ... bdc8cd47da

[Greenlaw]

Could the animation be on a sublayer? It's hard to say since you have the bone layer closed in the video, but the way the whole path moves makes me think that it is. Just a guess.

[Greenlaw]

Regarding the Reference Not Found error, I'm not sure why you're seeing that but it sounds like Moho may have corrected the issue. Does it happen again after saving the project? If so, try saving a copy of the project and then break the references in the version (R-click then Break Reference Layers). That should make the error go away anyway.

I know some work was done for Moho 13.5.5 to help Moho find files using both Relative and Absolute paths, which is probably how it was able to 'find' the 'missing' references. I suppose it's possible that this happened in error but I've never seen that happen here so it's just a guess.

As for what caused the error in the first place, if you haven't physically moved files, there must be another reason Moho couldn't find the files. Just a thought: are you working out of a Dropbox directory? For some reason Moho has trouble working out of a Dropbox directory so it's better to copy the files to a regular directory and work from there.

Hope this helps or at least eliminate some possibilities for the error.

[Greenlaw]

Asking again because I just saw the error here: Do you work out of Dropbox?

I was launching Moho and I saw the error with the file I opened last. This was puzzling at first because there are no referenced layers in this project. But then I checked where Moho was reading from and it was a Dropbox folder.

Archiving files in Dropbox isn't unusual for me because I often share files to the forums from there. But as mentioned earlier, Moho cannot work properly with files stored on Dropbox, so any project files that are being used by Moho need to be stored in a regular folder outside of the Dropbox folder.

Anyway, if you're still seeing this error and you are using Dropbox, this should solve the problem for you.

[jonathan.reaux]

Hey, thanks Greenlaw for the feedback.
I was able to fix it in the following way.
There were keyframes on frame 1, and when I deleted those, everything was fixed. Even though they were set to stepped, and even though I was trying to add keyframes way later in the timeline after other keys were set, I was still getting the snapping and the weird errors. So not sure why those keys on frame 1 made any difference at all. It seems like a strange bug. But none the less.
And yes, I am using dropbox to sync the files between different contractors. And the files are synced onto my device. So I'm assuming this is not good practice?