How do I get smooth smart bone pixel movement?

[Bat]

I'm getting really jagged movement sometimes with unparented smart bone dials. Not every time, but sometimes. Those times it not providing a smooth movement when I try to use the bone, but kind of a jagged, jerky one. I've experimented with the frame count in the action window, but that doesn't seem to fix the problems. I really am not sure what's going on here. Can someone help?

For context, I'm a new user. I did some character creation and rigging back in 12, but that was years ago when 12 was still new.

[synthsin75]

Usually that's due to not having enough frames in the smart bone's action, but you said you checked that.
The next thing I'd suspect is a conflict, where the same elements have been keyframed in more than one smart bone action.

[Bat]

[EDIT: Never mind. I fixed it and it was an embarrassingly stupid misunderstanding on my part re: rigging smart bone dials.] For clarity's sake, how many frames would you use to have eyes go left and right on a character like the original Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, where the eyes are one simple shape?

[Greenlaw]

It's whatever you will need for the speed you will be animating; in other words, there's no 'standard' number that will work for every situation.

By default, I use 48 or 96 for most things. For something that travels a short distance, maybe 24 or 36. In rare situations, I've set up up Smart Bones with thousands of frames.

The thing to remember is that a Smart Bone plays its animation by whole frames, and doesn't interpolate in-between frames. This is why you need more frames if the animation looks 'steppy' on the Mainline.

So, if your Smart Bone eye animation is 24 frames long, try increasing it to 48 and see how that looks on the Mainline. If you anticipate animating the eye very slowly, you may need to increase the Smart Bone length further. After a while, you'll develop a feeling for how many frames you need for a particular Smart Bone Action.