Reference layer link broken

[Jkoseattle]

I created an eyeball and made a second eyeball as a reference layer, so that they move together. Then I created a bone dial for left-right movement (using only the source eyeball when creating the bone dial animation). Works great. When I went to make another bone dial for up and down movement, I discovered that moving the source eyeball no longer moves the reference eyeball. The left-right bone dial still works on both eyes, but I can't manually drag using translate layer and have both eyes move like I could when I first created the reference. I broke this somehow, (though it still works in the bone dial which is confusing). I thought Update Layer Reference was supposed to fix that, but it didn't. Selecting Locate Original Layer correctly takes me to the source eyeball. What's going on here?

[synthsin75]

Do you have an example file (with just the relevant parts to this problem)?

My first guess would be that you're using a bone influence binding method, and that translating the reference moves it outside of the bone influence. At least you don't mention any point motion involved. This is very dependent on how you animated it, what's keyframed in the smart bone actions, and if the default bone angle is keyed.

[Jkoseattle]

The layers I'm animating are eyeballs, and so the animation for the dial is simple layer translation. Other than the dial itself there are no bones involved with this issue. Or am I misunderstanding something?

[synthsin75]

The layers I'm animating are eyeballs, and so the animation for the dial is simple layer translation. Other than the dial itself there are no bones involved with this issue. Or am I misunderstanding something?

If you're only using layer translation, then translating the reference breaks the reference for the translate layer channel. If you really must do it this way, you might try offsetting the second eye using point motion and leaving the layer translation the same as the original.

[Greenlaw]

Without pics or a sample file, I'm having a little trouble understanding your setup too, but if it's the reference's animation that's gotten out of sync with the original, you can re-sync the reference's animation channels in the Timeline. To do that, right-click on the animation channel that's been changed and select Sync Channel To Original.

You may have already figured it out by now but the Update Reference options in the Layers panel are for syncing artwork layers and bones, not for syncing animation.

There's probably a zillion ways to set up eyes in Moho but, FWIW, I usually setup my eyes using several bones: three bones for the pupils, that is one for each pupil, and a master parent bone between them; a set of SBD bones for winking and blinking; and another SBD to change eye shapes for different emotions.

I use the master pupils bone to move both pupils, and then tweak the positions of the individual pupils with the child bones. The master is parented to the head bone so the pupils move with the rest of the head. To move the eyes as a group during a 'head turn' animation. I typically set up a smart bone animation to slide the eyes switch layer with the rest of facial features using a Head Turn SBD. If necessary, I might manually offset the eyes switch layer in addition to what the SBD does but the general placement is still controlled by the SBD.

The reason I use a Switch layer for the eyes is that sometimes I want different eye shapes, like a 'smile' group or a 'sleepy' group that can smoothly open and close in specific expressions. The actual blinking and winking is controlled by a couple of other SBDs, which control all the groups inside the eye switch. That might sound complicated but I find this gives me a very broad combination of expressions for the character without too many controls or keyframes to keep track of. Actually, it's really not that complicated once you have the workflow down.

I also do a simpler variation of this setup for the mouth, although the mouth can have a many more shapes in the switch if the character needs to talk a lot.