Smart bones change everything! Some examples

[Squeakydave]

Thanks for clarifying and pass on my compliments to the team.
The rigging is quite as spectacular as the designs though

[ruscular3d]

I tried using smart bone to do a head turn. Seem like during the process of moving mouth switch layer that it was working when setting it up. However when I exit to mainline mode everything but the mouth switch layer would turn with the head. I take it that smart bone can not move layer?

I have not tried this but maybe I could set up 2 color pt where the mouth is suppose to be, and use the tracking motion to attach mouth layer to the set of color point?!?!?

[funksmaname]

smart bones only control point position, curvature and line width right now - so you can't control layer position (or anything else) until more animated channels are added to smart bones.

[spoon]

Link Smart Bone Chain better quality

You can't create a smart action with more than one bone being 'smart' at a time , but you can do each action with the next bone's extreme positions in place. This will help the overall design of actions when used in conjunction with other actions in the mainline.
I call it a 'smart bone chain' , or if you prefer a more accurate terminology try ' compound boning' hey call it what you like but it can help to use this technique, be sure though it's about the way you position the points in this case not the program doing everything for you.

You might notice there aren't any angle constraint on the early version, that does help too but is not the sole reason that the IK works better.

In the future maybe smart bones may evolve to allow an even more sophisticated calculation which will include more than one bone, layer motion and child control.
Even without this there are many great possibilities as you can still use the old action techniques for layers within groups.

I may be getting a bit dense in my old age but I can't for the life of me figure out how you were able to set the extreme position of the shoulder bone while creating the arm action. Whenever I tried to set another bone in a smart action, it appears to work in the action itself, but not in the mainline. Does it only work using the IK tool, or should it work with the rotate bones tool as well? Now that I think about it I think I only tried using it with the rotate tool, as the manipulate bones tool is kind of a pain when it comes to going back and editing keyframes.

[funksmaname]

Turning other bones inside a smart bone action will not effect those bones in the main timene, however the point chunky is making is that when both bones are at the extreme your point compensation is more reliable than doing it 'out of context', so it's purely a visual workflow thing rather than a hidden feature only when creating/editing bone actions.

[spoon]

Ah...well..that does make more sense. I really think I need to sleep more. Still, a great idea.

[chucky]

Ah...well..that does make more sense. I really think I need to sleep more. Still, a great idea.

Yes , spoon , you look ...terrible...

[erikk]

I may be missing a trick here... I followed Selgin's example with an eye and set one bone for side-to-side motion, another for up-and-down motion. Very smooth if used independently. But when both are used together in order to move the eyeball at an angle, it stutters (I suspect the bones are fighting with one another and creating a stairstep effect. I've demonstrated in the video here.

Any thoughts?

[funksmaname]

they should work smoothly - only thing I can think of without seeing the file is: are the actions multi-layered? and if so, how many frames are there between the 100% position. This stepping might occur if you dont have enough frames in your action. For this example, since you dont need any changes while the pupils are moving, you can just use a single frame action for the smart bone in my experience.

if all else fails, post the file and we'll take a look at it.

[erikk]

Went with about 72 frames between actions. Here's a link to download the file from my dropbox:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1281255/eyeball.anme

[funksmaname]

try doubling it and see if it comes out smoother... there's no disadvantage to having 300 frames or any other amount, but if it's too low it will hop, skip and jump.

[RichardU]

Any thoughts?

Are any points bound to the Control Bones? They don't need to be. I've had good luck with just one frame actions for pupil movement.

[erikk]

Feeling a tiny bit frustrated. No point binding, I just tried from fresh empty. No bone strength on. If I do just one frame actions, it leaps immediately. It smooths the longer I make the action, so putting around 700 frames in the action smooths it out more. But clueless as to why I'm having trouble when others can do this in one frame.

Is it something to do with smooth/linear/etc. tweening?

I guess if I have to set these to 1000 frames between on the actions to get a nice smooth action, I'll just have to make a note of that. But somehow, I doubt that I'm doing it right if I have to do this.

[funksmaname]

Here is your problem:
smart bone actions rely on a single direction of bone rotation - which is why 2 actions can be created for each bone. One MUST ONLY rotate in a direction, and the other MUST ONLY rotate in the oposite direction. Which direction you start with is up to you, but they must both be unique.

The way you set up your eyes, they are in a central position, but then you rotate in one direction to get a starting position in the SBA. This will cause problems.

in order to only use a single SBA, the eyeball must be at one of the extreme positions before you create the action, so that it goes from, for example, far left at 0 rotation to far right at 100% rotation. The only way to do it with the eyeball initially in the center is to create two actions for the same smart bone, as below:

1) start with 'eyeball' bone pointing up and eye central
2) create action 'eyeball' and move pupil right all the way, rotate the bone from 0 to 90degs right (frame 1)
3) create another action 'eyeball 2' and move the pupil left, rotate the bone from 0 to -90degs (frame 1)

now in natural position the eye is in the middle, left rotate goes left and vice versa.
Do the same as above with up and down.

as soon as you have more than one frame, the number of frames between the poses comes into play and you will get less resolution to play with - this is so you can have completely different intermediary frames, but in the case of a simple linear motion this is unnecessary.

[RichardU]

After playing with Control Lever bones, here are the rules I use:

To use Control Lever bones for anything in the Head (eyes, pupils, etc.) the Head layer needs to be a bone layer and the Control Lever bones need to be in the Head layer.
I create the actions for those bones in either the Head Layer or the Bones layer above.
Control Lever bones should have constraints and the actions should be set at the constraints.
Only one frame is needed in the actions for simple linear movements.