Moho Forum

Hello, I want to animate the bones of a skeleton with a diferent animation for each bone. In the timeline appears all together. i know that when you select a bone their timeline changes to the animation of that bone BUT what usually happens is that a lot of keyframes appear in the bones that I-ve never moved.
i need to be able to modify single bones so that the others won´t change too.
is ther a curve editor for bones, like there is in studio max??

Hope someone can help me.
Thank you

Karina

I see your problem, as I find it hard to not click the wrong bones myself. But the system works. Just remember to 1. always select only the bone you really want to move, 2. alwayxs use the right tool, and 3. only touch keys on the lower timeline.

It just needs a bunch of discipline to work with this. Some points to remember:
- better select bones with the bone select tool ("B") - when you use some movement tool, it will create a key the moment you touch the bone.
- the inverse kinematic tool ("Z") will create keys in all bone rotate channels in the chain which have a change. I find it easier sometimes to do such movement with the rotate tool only.

Usually I break up my characters into several bone layers, like having both legs in one layer, each arm in a separate layer, and the remaining body in one layer. This way I can more easily combine a walk cycle with arm gestures in different timing.

slowtiger wrote: Usually I break up my characters into several bone layers, like having both legs in one layer, each arm in a separate layer, and the remaining body in one layer. This way I can more easily combine a walk cycle with arm gestures in different timing.

Then do you put everything in a group layer? Also how do you connect all of those different body parts to each other?

udd

I must've written this a dozen times now ... anyway.

Here's a setup similar to what I use.

- bone layer (the main character layer)
- - head switch layer
- - - front view head
- - - side view head
- - arm bone layer 1 (left)
- - - vector layers
- - arm bone layer 2 (right)
- - - vector layers
- - body vector layer
- - legs bone layer
- - - leg vector layer 1
- - - leg vector layer 2

and so on. You'll see that everything is in one root layer, a bone layer in my case. Sometimes I even put this bone layer of the character inside a group layer (like together with another character and a car).

There's no strict rule about this. I had characters with up to 200 layers sometimes, and characters with only 3 layers.

Thanks for the info. I guess I should spend some time going over the old posts on the forum to get some of these answers. I can see you know what you are talking about though.

udd