Moho Forum

For some reason I'm not being given the option to bind points to a bone for certain layers. It appears that I CAN bind point on vectors that are on a layer with out a red dot next the layer name. But any layer that has a red dot, I can't bind points on that layer, to a bone. Any ideas why this is?
Thanks in advance,

Dan

With the layer highlighted, go to the menu bar and select Bone->Release layer. This should make the points available for binding. The red dot means the layer is optimized for Flash output.

I've been running into this a few times lately. As the OP mentioned above, I can't get the bones to bind with shapes in a layer once the dot comes on. Selecting Release Layer or Release 'anything' doesn't seem to make the dot go away or make the points available for binding.

I haven't even been able to figure out what causes this--the points are working one moment, I make an adjustment, the red dot appears and the rig breaks. The adjustment probably has to do with an added bone to the Flexibinding but still not sure what the actual cause is. In each case where this happened, I was using the Use Selected Bones For Flexibinding command.

My fix has been to go to remove the 'bad' shapes, go to an older version, copy the old shapes and paste them into the layer were the bad shapes was, and then all is good again. I'd still like to understand why the shapes goes 'bad' though and how I can fix them (besides replacing the shapes with a different version I mean.)

Any tips? Thanks in advance for any helpful info.

G.

All the suggestions I've seen recommend releasing the layer. But since this doesn't work in my case, and because I can fix the issue by replacing the shapes in the layer with older ones, this naturally makes me think the issue is specific to the shapes, not the layer. Does this mean the shapes data is somehow becoming corrupted?

Ugh...I hate these kind of problems.

G.

Curiously, if I create a keyframe for the shapes at frame 1, the red dot goes away. but if I remove the key at frame one, the dot comes back. Not sure what that means yet.

I finally resorted to my 'fix'...I went to the previous version, copied the shapes, deleted the 'bad' shapes and pasted in the older version, and it works fine now, even with the added bones to the rig (the red dot also went away.) That's fine but I'm wondering what I could have done if I didn't have the back up shapes available?

In today's case, the shapes that went 'bad' was a 'torso', and yesterday it was a 'left arm', which otherwise was identical to the 'right arm' which was still working correctly even though it has the same rig set up. Even the shapes were the same, the points were just flopped. As today, replacing the shapes in the layer with an earlier version, from before the red dot appeared, made the rig work again and made the red dot go away. Any thoughts?

G.

Greenlaw wrote:Curiously, if I create a keyframe for the shapes at frame 1, the red dot goes away. but if I remove the key at frame one, the dot comes back. Not sure what that means yet.

I finally resorted to my 'fix'...I went to the previous version, copied the shapes, deleted the 'bad' shapes and pasted in the older version, and it works fine now, even with the added bones to the rig (the red dot also went away.) That's fine but I'm wondering what I could have done if I didn't have the back up shapes available?

In today's case, the shapes that went 'bad' was a 'torso', and yesterday it was a 'left arm', which otherwise was identical to the 'right arm' which was still working correctly even though it has the same rig set up. Even the shapes were the same, the points were just flopped. As today, replacing the shapes in the layer with an earlier version, from before the red dot appeared, made the rig work again and made the red dot go away. Any thoughts?

G.

The red dot indicates the layer is still optimized for swf export. Point motion is not supported for swf export, so keyframing any points will remove the red dot and deleting such keyframes restores it.

There are several ways to disrupt bone influence, especially in nested layers where the bone influence can be interrupted by an intervening group/bone layer. If you like, the next time this happens you can PM me an example file and I can let you know exactly how to fix it the easy way.

Thanks. I think I still have copies of some broken rigs so I may take you up on that. I'll check when I get home tonight.

Yeah, I believe the red dot is just happens to be an indicator to my problem but not the actual cause--I don't think the layer being 'swf-safe' by itself has anything to do with it. There's just something odd going on here at the shape/points level.

BTW, in at least two cases where I ran into this, the shapes were not nested in a group, they were directly under the bones layer. Ugh...very frustrating. Thankfully it happens infrequently, and luckily I save many iterations.

G.

Greenlaw wrote:Thankfully it happens infrequently, and luckily I save many iterations.

Great routine to maintain, even if you're not having these sorts of problems.

Hmm...here it is a year later, and I just ran into this problem again. I have a 'red dot' vector layer that I can't bind points to. I know the red dot signifies Flash Optimization and it is probably coincidental to this issue, but this really does appear to be the same problem again.

This time, I have a rigged character and the red dot is on the right arm, which should be technically identical to the left arm. The right arm had been working perfectly but some where along the way, the binding broke and the red dot appeared. I tried every conceivable way to release the layer and points and rebind them but, even though ASP appears to acknowledge the binding action, the points in the layer are not moving.

Just for kicks, I tried doing several things that, according to the manual, should "de-optimize" the layer and make the red dot go way--like moving the camera in 3D space, shearing and scaling the layer, animating the points--but the red dot remains. Now my feeling is that when this situation occurs, the layer is just hopelessly hosed, and the red dot in this case is not an indication of Flash optimization but a part of the layer hosery.

What I finally wound up doing is copying the art from the Arm Left layer and pasting it into a new Arm Right layer. After I applied use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding, this arm was working fine so I deleted the bad 'red dot' layer.

This may be the third time I've seen this issue since I started using ASP and I think all a user can do to get out of it is to save many revisions while working so there is always a recent 'good' scene to fall back on.

It's fortunate that this has been a rare occurrence for me but I was just wondering if anybody else has run into this issue.

G.