Moho Animation Forum

I lost much of the work I put into my character's head after I drew the body and added skeleton bones. It's not devastating because I can rebuild what I lost but I didn't see the danger that adding new bones would have on the existing ones. I'm hoping some of you can share what you've learned about rigging with SB's.
I rigged the head with Smartbones. The head could turn and talk while talking. It could also change expression while turning.
I then drew a body and added bones, including a head bone which may have caused the problems. I lost all point motion in every vector layer of the mouth switch. I lost most point motion and Line Width in the nose, which was in a bone layer. I also lost some point motion and Masking properties in the eyes.
I'm thinking I could eliminate a head bone and replace it with a SB dial that tilts the head from side to side but I like to animate the head up and down by scaling the neck bone. I need a solution for that.
One of things I will do from this point is save my work by renaming it before I try something new.

This does not sound like something that would be caused by adding new bones or incorrect smart bones. Smart bones are simply actions controlling bones. The problem of losing your smart bones results is probably related to the new bones you added that changed how points are controlled or the rotation of the bones.

One thing that might be causing the problem would be bone parenting and hierarchy. Is it possible that bone parenting got changed for effected bones or smart bones when you started adding new bone and smart bone actions? Remember that bone rotation is critical to smart bones. If you changed the parent of a bone and it's rotated, the rotation changes. This can cause smart bones to work differently or even "break". If the rotation of the smart bone is changed outside of the action, the action rotation is probably going to be incorrect.

Another thing that can effect how smart bones work with vectors is bone influence. If you added new bones that changed the bone influence over smart bone controlled points, then the result would be completely different.

Make sure the bone names for smart bones are unique. I think you can get odd results with same named bones for smart bones. I haven't tried it yet.

I suppose no way to see the broken file? It would be easier to work out what actually happened by looking at the file.

Sounds like it might be to do with the layer binding of the new bone layer interfering with the nested controlling of the child layers. If you delete the bones and release the layer your control over movement should come back... a bound child bone layer will block its parents access to its children...

funksmaname wrote:... a bound child bone layer will block its parents access to its children...

Man, parental custody squabbling in AS.

Heyvern,I got so discouraged that I turned my computer off.
if I understand correctly I may have to rig 'from the neck up'. One SB controlled head turns and switch layer. The 2nd SB controlled head tilt and switch layer. I added more SB's for expressions in eyes, brows, mouth etc. I removed all parenting and reduced bone strength to zero.
It sounds like a bone hierarchy has to come first. It seems daunting because I want to build characters that speak both to the camera and to other characters. I'll use a lot of forshortening of arms and legs.
Funksmaname, The peculiar thing is the SB Action worked normally but not in the timeline even after I deleted the offending bones!

It can definitely get discouraging and frustrating. I've been there before, and that was super simple rigs and long before Smart Bones were invented. Stick with it, it sounds like you're on the right track.