Making a smart action - everything dissapears.

[NealF2]

Hi,

I'm new to actions but I'm following several tutorials and it's not doing what it's supposed to

The first problem (and that's all I'll mention for now) is that after I Make a smart dial, when I click on create an action, everything disappears.
I do get a new timeline but it's maroon and not blue. So I double click the bone layer and re make it visible.

The character does come back but it's moved and a different size.

I won't go into the other weirdnesses now. Trying to keep this simple.

Thanks.

[NealF2]

UPDATE:

I finally got it working.

Still have several mysteries, though.

1. Why does the character disappear when I create the action?
2. Why does the smart dial and character change position when creating the action.

Also, when creating the head looking down position, I thought I could move all the parts of the head (eyes, mouths, brows, etc) together since they're all in a folder.
But I have to move each vector layer individually. Takes longer, but no big deal.

[Greenlaw]

Hi Neal!

I don't have answers for everything because I would need to see the project, but generally speaking, it sounds like there may exist conflicts between the current Smart Bone and one or more other Smart Bones.

This can happen in two places:

1. Check that other Smart Bones aren't being unintentionally activated in the action. You can tell this by the bold highlight on any of the bones...only the bones you want activated should be bold. It's pretty easy to activate other bones, Smart or otherwise, if you're not careful about using Ctrl+F, or when you accidentally click the background with Transform Bones while other bones are selected.

2. Check that the Smart Bone Action isn't fighting with another Smart Bone Action over elements in your rig. This can happen when both actions are active, so you may not notice this right away.

I suspect the latter is what's happening. To prevent this, I try to animate different items to do the same thing in different Smart Bones so there is no conflict. For example, I might animate the layer in one Action and the Points in another, or I'll parent the items to a bone and animate the bone instead.

Re: moving the parts of a face, if they are moving the same distance, parent them to a 'face' bone and move the bone instead. If you have two controls, one for vertical movement and one for horizontal, be careful to animate only horizontal motion in one and only vertical in the other. Or, separate the motions to different items as described above.

Some of this info is covered in my recent YouTube tutorials on using Smart Bones.

Hope this helps!

-DRG

[Greenlaw]

Oh! This is just another guess, but check your bone binding or the keyframing of an item in the action. When a Smart Bone is activated, it's possible that an unintended binding or setting, or an item's keyframing, is throwing one or more items way off-screen, so they appear to disappear.

[NealF2]

Thanks, Greenlaw.

I'll be looking into those suggestions.
Right now there's only one action. But I did go through a lot of trials to get to that point. So maybe there's a smart bone that has no action?

Won't know till I look through everything.
Thanks for the suggestions.

BTW, still not getting notified when there's a reply. And I made sure to check the notify me. Weird.

[NealF2]

I went too far without figuring it out so now it's impossible to find what I did. But I think it IS something to do with cross orders from actions. So for now, I just figured out a work around that's okay.

I now ran into another phenomena. I've got a face turn all worked out in an action. I put the eyebrows and pupils in a neutral position and they move left and right (or up and down) the correct way.

But if I try to move the pupils, brows or mouths in the main timeline, they won't stay where I put them. They just snap back as soon as I go to the next frame.

I'm thinking that somehow the action is negating the move in the main timeline.
If this is true, is the only way around this to take the pupils, brows etc, out of the action and put them into another layer? Of course, then I would have to carefully sync them to the face turns. A bit tricky.

Also, since those features are in the layer order they need to be, I'm not sure how to take them out of the action and put them somewhere where they could be independent.

Whew! This is pretty complicated stuff and I appreciate the help.