Bone Locking is FANTASTIC! Don't be afraid of it!

Have you come up with a good Moho trick? Need help solving an animation problem? Come on in.

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Mikdog
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Post by Mikdog »

man i gotta try me some bone locking.

Vern: looks good.

Selgin: Nice one re: bigger bones to lock.

I've just never used bone locking. Always done it manually. Bit of a flippen mission to key frame every single little frame. What I normally do is make another stationary layer and put a little circle there for position reference, and move each bone (well in this case a foot bone) to the circle for each frame. Becomes a bit of a drag.

Will give bone locking another look. No clue how it works but I guess its in the manual so there's no excuse!
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Víctor Paredes
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Post by Víctor Paredes »

Hi guys, at office we have made some fantastic discoveries about lock bone mysteries. I can't post examples or explain it right now, but I think we finally tamed them.
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patricia3d
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Post by patricia3d »

Many Many Thanks Selgin. But Please when you post, keep your idea open for people having 6.2.
Lebostein
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Re:

Post by Lebostein »

selgin wrote:Hi guys, at office we have made some fantastic discoveries about lock bone mysteries. I can't post examples or explain it right now, but I think we finally tamed them.
And? All lock and unlock mysteries solved? I am very interested in a description for using the locking/unlocking feature. Now 2015 the locking and unlocking of bones seems buggy (or very hard/complex/awkward to use) as 2010... The official manual losing not a single word about it (!!).... The only thing I found is that old tutorial (from 2008) with that armless Frank, but this tutorial deals with locking of bones outside the timeline only.

My main question is: How I unlock bones during an animation without popping/slipping? I have experimented with all possibilities, without success. I hoped freezing of all bones one frame before unlocking helps, but it did not work...

Try this:
1. open the tutorial 3.2 from the ressources (/Resources/Support/Tutorials/3 - Bones/Tutorial 3.2.moho)
2. select the bone layer of Frank (frame 0 should be selected)
3. select the 2 foot bones and lock them
4. go to frame 12 and move the head bone a little bit down, so the knees moving outward
5. go to frame 18 and freeze all bones (to make the position save) with "Animation/Freeze" Pose in the menu
6. go to frame 24 and unlock one of the foot bones - and cry :cry: the foot is snapping down
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funksmaname
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Re: Bone Locking is FANTASTIC! Don't be afraid of it!

Post by funksmaname »

Bone locking isn't really necessary now that we have target bones... these work much better than locking!

This might help (try around 6:45):
Lebostein
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Re: Bone Locking is FANTASTIC! Don't be afraid of it!

Post by Lebostein »

OK, I found it out. It took me about 8 hours to solve the puzzle. There are three rules that must be followed consistently:

1. Be sure that "Auto-assist with bone locking keyframes" in preferences is selected
2. For selecting bones to lock or unlock them use the bone selecting tool necessarily. All other tools generate a keyframe for the selected bone that will destroy the animation after locking/unlocking.
3. To unlock bones, don't use the frame of your last animation changes (1). Go to the next frame (2) and unlock the bone or a group of bones (3). Don't use this unlock frame for other things.

Image

That sounds simple but not necessarily intuitive. It would be useful to find these hints in the manual.

A very excessive usage of locking and unlocking of bones you find in this (very cool) resource example:
\Smith Micro\Anime Studio\Resources\Support\Library\Characters\Partners\Victor Paredes\Afraid of balls.anme
This example helps me to find out how locking and unlocking works without side effects.

@funksmaname: Thanks, I will see this later at evening. But I am using the Debut version. I think this is a Pro feature.
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