Leg with target bone not bending in proper direction

[Ty505]

I want the left leg to bend out to the left, not bend to the side as seen in the video
https://imgur.com/a/9DFpTvL

[synthsin75]

On frame one, move the target until the leg bends the wrong way. Now rotate the shin bone until it pops in the desired direction.
Now you can remove the target bone keyframe, and the shin bone will have that desired angle set.

What happens is that Moho doesn't know which way you want a straight leg to bend to reach a target bone. Doing the above tells Moho what you want it to do.

[Hoptoad]

On frame one, move the target until the leg bends the wrong way. Now rotate the shin bone until it pops in the desired direction.
Now you can remove the target bone keyframe, and the shin bone will have that desired angle set.

What happens is that Moho doesn't know which way you want a straight leg to bend to reach a target bone. Doing the above tells Moho what you want it to do.

Thanks for this information. I just used it on a character's legs that always bent in the wrong direction when I used target bones, and now the legs bend correctly.

[Greenlaw]

Normally, when you rig the character you want to pre-bend the joint to the preferred direction. This tells Moho which way it should bend the joint when you move the target. To change the direction from your pre-bend direction during animation, use the Transform Bone tool to rotate the lower limb bone in the opposite direction, or when you're using the Manipulate Bone tool you can press and hold Ctrl to switch to FK mode and do this. (IMO, the second method is more efficient because you don't need to change tools.)

Here's a visual for the above...



First I'm moving the target bone with the default pre-bend in the knee joint. Then I change the rotation direction of the lower leg bone and use the target bone to animate the leg with the reverse bend. (The reversing technique is probably more useful for an elbow joint than in a knee joint...but use it wherever you need it of course.)

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Additional tips for the above...

Tip #1: Note that only the joint needs the pre-bend, not the artwork.

Tip #2: When testing the rig, you should do this on a non-zero frame. This is because IK with a Target Bone may not work accurately on the setup frame (frame 0), it really only works properly on an actual animation frame (frame 1 or later.) (Sub-tip: I like to use the Design Mode shortcut to toggle between the setup frame and my test frame.)

Tip #3: During an animation, you would normally create a keyframe to lock-in the prebend in the frame before the frame where you change directly.

Tip #4: To hide the knee 'pop', you can enable Squash And Stretch Constraint on the leg bones. I didn't do this in this example, thus the 'pop'. There are other methods for hiding the 'pop' but using Squash And Stretch is the easiest...the trick is to always have a little stretch going on in the legs when the character is standing upright.

[synthsin75]

Creating the bones with a pre-bend only works where you don't need the joint in a precise location...because you're using smart bones, etc..
Most of my rigs require the joint at the center of the rotation.