Moho Forum

Hey,
Following on from Selgin's webinar this morning, I wanted to share some recent thoughts on rigging.
Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, and happy to discuss anything...

Great! I was just laughing when see the fantastic head turn you rig and the multiple frame actions you made for the fingers. It's very clever!
Also, your hand flip is awesome, I would never have thought on something like that! It's fantastic how the fingers smart bones continue working with the hand flipped. Right now I'm working in a rig and needed that kind of hand, your technique came just in time, thanks!

The both of you (Funk & Selgin) have been of great help to me... thank you!

funksmaname . you really made my day. i was thinking yesterday if i can deal with hands without using switch... you are genius , thanks for the great tip..and special thanks to selgin to for his great webinar

Thanks all
Yeah, I was quite pleased with the potential of the hand, and more conceptually having a 'fan' of chained control bones around any 'part'... having the smaller end bones tweak the pose of their parent can really add a lot of readily available options.

In fact, and this is generally my biggest problem with AS (ESPECIALLY NOW), I have so much fun just wiggling bones and seeing how the 'puppet' comes to life that I never bother animating!! I spend ages just pulling things around like I'm a kid playing with dolls I wish I actually had an idea of what to do with it and I might actually get some animation done

Thank you Victor for all your inspiration. It's through sharing this knowledge that others come up with new ideas and share them back - everybody wins

Great tutorial, I love the way you handle the hand movements, thanks for sharing!

Thanks particularly for the hand tips. There is so much attention paid to head turns around here that the very challenging task of rigging a versatile hand is often overlooked. Your method gives me a lot of ideas.

Incidentally, you always introduce yourself on your tutorials by saying "Hello, this is funksmaname..." Surely, it should be "Hello, this is funk", unless your name is really funksmaname, in which case your nickname would be funksmanamesmaname - which is a bit of a mouthful!

lol. Funksmanamesmaname actually. People call me funks or funk as a friendly shortening, but Funksmanamesmaname.
Glad you liked the vid - I should create an in/out vid for my tutorials but I usually just rush into them without a clear idea of what I'll cover (should probably plan better too)
Actually, I think a head rotation is potentially less useful than more broad ideas on how to pose things, depends what your animation requires I guess, but I'd hazard a guess that turning heads is not needed very often, and usually is added 'coz you can'.

Impressive work, funksmaname. As I understand it's almost impossible to achieve same smooth hands transition by using switch layers? I still cant decide whether to use switches or smart bones for hands animation of my character. Smart bones give you more control over movements but its seems that you can easily be lost in mixing them with each other. Swithes on the other hand is more rough way of animation but at least you don't have to worry about those movement intermixing problems.

As each pose is based on the same points, you could use switch layer interpolation, thou switch layers are a 100% target, and including subtly would be more difficult. I see no reason why you couldn't store the same switch positions in actions to recall instead (actions that set a smart bone rotation and point tweak to create a pose for example).

The other advantage of using actions over switches is that you're not duplicating your hand over and over, and so any future changes need to be done to all sub switch layers. If you KNOW this will never be an issue then it's fine, but that's not how I work usually.

Truth is there are pluses and minuses for using either method and it's really a situational decision... In my mind switch layers are most useful when you intend to use vastly different point setups to create new views not possible from your main part construction, like changing rotation or angle to one that requires many more or less points to draw, but in those instances switch interpolation is not possible.

I think you are right. I would like to explore smart bones more, sometimes I really like the results that come out from mixing different smart bones on one shape - be it mouth, hands or feet. Yet Im still desigining a character and quite far away from animation at this point and I wonder is it possible to fix occuring shape distortions caused by two or more smart bones actions during animation process? Or those distortions are unavoidable and wont be easily fixed by simpe point tweaking ?

Yeah, unfortunately those distortions can't be avoided, which is partly combatted by having distinct groups of actions that work together (above organised in unique chains) ... You could copy a corrected mix into it own smart bone though, or if you dont use the pose too much you can fix it with manual point motion, or create a 'fix bone' which would mix in the point correction at the right mix and optionally save those bone rotation combinations in a normal action for recall, as though they were switch layers.

funksmaname wrote:Yeah, unfortunately those distortions can't be avoided, which is partly combatted by having distinct groups of actions that work together (above organised in unique chains) ... You could copy a corrected mix into it own smart bone though, or if you dont use the pose too much you can fix it with manual point motion, or create a 'fix bone' which would mix in the point correction at the right mix and optionally save those bone rotation combinations in a normal action for recall, as though they were switch layers.

Well it would take dozens of additional bones to fix all the distortions in my case so I think it would be easier to fix those problems by manual point motion during animation process. I just don't really understand how this would work out since smart bone action would move points in one direction while Ill be trying to move them in another. Wouldnt it be a mess? Or manual point motion automatically considered superior to bone actions?

Also I have a huge mess with animating fingers. For easier use I divided every finger of my character in two shapes so I can put one shape above another when it's needed. But soon I found out that shape order is actually can't be animated and when I move one shape on top this change is applied to whole animation even frame 0. Is there any way to solve this problem? Because I really don't want to divide hand into layers!

I don't mean dozens of bones to fix distortions, but one bone with specific point motion for fixing a mess.
(edit: sorry I see now what you mean, if you have many many combinations, you'll need many fix bones - ill leave this here in case others find it useful though)

1) create 2 bones with actions that do different things
2) create a 3rd nine you will use to fix the pose when the other two are mixed
3) inside that bone, rotate the 2 bones to see the mess you made
4) now rotate the fix bone (still inside it's smart bone action) and fix all the points.

What you'll notice is that in the main timeline if you rotate JUST the fixed bone it will create a complete mess, BUT if you only use it when theop other two are mixed together it will recall your fix every time (saving you from doing that fixing point option in the timeline directly)

However, the layer ordering issue is another ideal use case for switch layers. Since switch layers are themselves bones you can have the same default hand duplicated as sub switch layers, each with different layer ordering, and the hand bones in the parent switch. Now you can add smart bones to the parent and switching the layers will just flip the order.

Anothe however however, it means you have to duplicate your smart fixes in each child layer... Bummer

My preference he would probably be to use Synths shape stack animation select shape mod, available over on the other forum once you have access to he VIP section (50 good posts)

Thanks, funksmaname! You have always been super-cool to me. Perhapas, Ill follow your fixing bone advice.
Btw, can you tell me more about this stack animation select shape mod - is it allowing you to animate shape order? Is it some kind of script or what? I really don't want to get back to the switches especially with all that work what Ive done with smart bones hand actions. And I still have a second hand to "get smart" so its hella lot of work ahead for me.