Lock Bone tips

[Hoptoad]

Ages ago, I tried using Lock Bone and it was a disaster. Eventually, I started using Target Bones (which are great).

I'm now wanting to try using Lock Bone again, but the only video I found regarding Lock Bone on YouTube was over a decade old and confusing to me.

What's the best practice for constructing the bone rig for a simple leg and foot? What is the best practice for locking and unlocking a bone?

Aside from feet, are there any other common uses for Lock Bone?

My previous efforts were painful, so I want to gather some wisdom before trying again.

Thanks.

[Greenlaw]

I normally don't bother with Lock Bone for legs. I generally prefer using target bones and setting the foot bones to use Independent Angle. But if you do use Lock Bone, here are some tips...

In 14.1, make sure you have Auto Assist In Bone Lock enabled. This sets a transform key for the bone in the locked bone's preceding frame when you unlock the bone.

When this option is disabled, or when using an older version of Moho, you need to keyframe the bone manually before unlocking it. Otherwise, it will 'pop' because it will interpolate from the last keyframed position for that item.

That's pretty much it. The advantage of Lock Bone is that it requires no extra setup. But it is more fiddly to animate with than when using a bone target and Independent Angle setup.

[Hoptoad]

Thanks, your post helped some - much more than manual (the online manual has 1 sentence on Lock Bone and 1 more on Auto-Assist).

Perhaps I'm expecting too much from Lock Bone. It's impossible for me to know, since evidently I'm supposed to intuit all the tricky things about the feature.

It seems to me that, when locking a foot bone, a lower leg bone with Max IK Stretching 150% would stretch a bit before the locked foot would move, but nope.

Also, I used Auto-Assist, but it didn't seem to work. There was no "extra" keyframe, only the 1 keyframe when I unlocked the bone. And when I unlocked the foot bone, the foot moved. I thought Auto-Assist helped with that, but again, nope. I must have no idea what Lock Bone does.

Every time I seek to master Lock Bone, it's like I'm Shakespeare's Henry V, "Stiffen[ing] the sinews, summon[ing] up the blood," while shouting, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!" But suddenly - GASP! - the simile abruptly changes and now I'm in the movie Starship Troopers, being mobbed by a thousand giant bugs.

Alas, Poor Yorick, sprayed with giant beetle acid in Act 2.

[synthsin75]

From another thread:

You generally want to have the bone chain keyframed where one of its bones lock and the bones keyframed the frame before it unlocks.
If you lock/unlock a bone in between keyframes, it will jump into the existing interpolation. So lock/unlock need to be treated like freeze keyframes.

[Hoptoad]

Thank you. I assumed Lock Bone knew how to do that already, since. . .why wouldn't it? Why give the user one more step? It's almost like giving the user a pop-up window whenever they unlock a bone that says, "Do you want the unlocked bone to work properly or not properly? Click Yes/No."

Those are rhetorical questions; don't answer.

Sigh.

There are also other problems I'm having with Lock Bone, but never mind. I'm back to using Target Bones and my clunky work-arounds.

Gripe, gripe, gripe.

Moho is great, but sometimes it seems like Lost Marble expects its users to have mastered several other animation programs before Moho can be used completely. Well, I don't know anything about Toon Blam or Adobe Anime or whatever.