Trapdoor puzzle

[Akage]

Hello there all.

I have made a trapdoor controlled by a bone with an action covering the perspective movement. Bit wonky if you look close, but it works fine for what I want it to do. However, there's something going on behind the scenes that I can't figure out.

The movement of the points looks fine in the action timeline, but in the mainline, the movement stutters. To me, it looks like the controlling bone is moving on singles and the door is on doubles, if you see what I mean.

Again, it's not a problem for what I want to achieve, I'm just curious as to what's going on. All I can think of is something to do with setting the action over 50 frames?

Here's the file if anyone fancies messing about with it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4kzdyc243rar ... .moho?dl=0

Cheers, Russell

[synthsin75]

It's usually best practice to make smart actions extend to about 100 frames, as that provides the interpolation "resolution" to be smooth on the main timeline.

[Greenlaw]

That's right, Smart Bone Actions do not interpolate sub-frames, only whole frames, so make sure you include enough frames for the smoothest playback. Wes suggested 100 but it depends on the animation. For smooth body turn Actions, for example, I may use 720 or more frames on the timeline for a single turn. For some Smart Bone animations, I may uses as little as a few frames (generally when smooth interpolation isn't wanted or much of a concern.)

The actual playback timing, of course, is determined by how you animate your Smart Bone Dial, but it can only use the whole frames visible in the Action.

[hayasidist]

if you take a look at the action - not all points are keyed at each keyframe within the transitions from "top visible to side" and then "side to bottom visible" - that might explain some "odd" judder -- e.g. at the start of motion from closed towards open, the near edge / visible side starts to move before the rest which then needs to speed up to catch up with the front (take a look at frames 8/9/10/11) and also note how the grain effect extends slightly past the end of the boards

the actual SB rotation in mainline has some interesting keying too ... not entirely clear why you've chosen the variety of interpolation modes in the intermediate keys between closed and open ...

[Akage]

Thank you for your replies. For things like head turns and actions to tidy up knee/arm bends I’ve typically been using 50 frames, which has worked fine so far. I can see why a 100 degree or so turn needs a broader canvas to work properly. It’s not terribly polished in it’s current state I know!

One thing I had trouble with was picking out the upper/lower points of the grain as they overlapped and changed shape order as the door opens. Grouping the points is helping. My scattershot interpolation choices, well, I haven"t done much animation in Moho so far! Aside from a few tutorials. My background is in stop motion, so my instinct was just to fair up/down at each end of the movement by playing with the bezier handles. The design and rigging side of things is taking me quite a while to get to grips with, hopefully I’ll get to investigate the animation tools more thoroughly soon.

Cheers guys.