Why do drawn bones have an offset? How to have exact locations?

[mmmaarten]

Hi,

I must be missing something here; after drawing a curve with the Sketch Bones tool the generated bones start at the right spot but end way off with a heavy offset [Please see video below].

How can I use the tool to create bones at the exact locations of the curve? (What am I missing here?)

[slowtiger]

Two possible sources of error:
- check that layer's Z depth. It should be 0.
- sometimes you get erratic behaviour because the layer's origin is way off. Reset the layer position, or the origin point.

[SimplSam]

I think the best thing to do is draw-through the final destination point. It seems to work better that way. You can then delete any excess.

[mmmaarten]

Two possible sources of error:
- check that layer's Z depth. It should be 0.
- sometimes you get erratic behaviour because the layer's origin is way off. Reset the layer position, or the origin point.

Thanks. I checked the Z, but it is 0. Also the layer's origins are still the same (why should it mess up the draw tool tho. I would expect moho to do the conversion to local space underwater tho so we don't need to think about origins when drawing bones, right?)

I think the best thing to do is draw-through the final destination point. It seems to work better that way. You can then delete any excess.

Thanks. I tried that, but it's still the same

[Greenlaw]

Hi mmmaarten,

Hmm...that's very strange. I use Sketch Bones all the time for creating and animating bone chains and have never see that happen. Just to be sure, here's a test I made a few minutes ago...


I'm curious but can you check your Windows Scaling setting? I find that if the setting is not set to an increment of 100% there might be UI offset issues in Moho. If your setting is at, say, 125% or 150%, try setting it to 100% or 200% and see if that fixes the problem.

Update:

I played around with Sketch Bones a little more this morning and was able to get a small offset to occur, but I couldn't do this consistently and I'm not sure what I did differently to cause that. ATM, I'm seeing the correct behavior and can't get it to do the offset. Will continue to look into this later.

[Greenlaw]

Another update:

My Windows Display Scaling was set to 100% and I changed it to 125% and 150% to see what happens, and it made no difference. Sketch Bones was accurately drawing bones along the sketched line most of the time. (BTW, 150% is the 'recommended' setting but I dropped it down to 100% because 150% is actually too big for my laptop screen.)

Sketch Bones did create 1 off-set result in about 15 tries before I stopped testing. I'm not sure what was different about that one time, and Moho was very accurate the other 14 times. ATM, I feel the one offset result was a random glitch.

I also tried different Workspace zoom levels but this made no difference.

So, I'm still not sure why you're consistently getting that offset result. If I have time, I'll look into this further tonight after work.

Other things you can try:

Try adjusting the bone length value. Does making it smaller or larger improve anything?

How about when you use a different Bone Display Width setting? (Mine is set to Medium.)

If you're using a tablet and pen, try updating the drivers.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

This next tip isn't related to the offset problem but it's helpful for rigging drawing for Sketch Bones animation.

When I'm setting up something very flexible, like a tail or tentacles, I'll draw the item in a straight line rather than posed (i.e, curled like the tail in your dragon). This way, when I use Sketch Bones, the deformation will look good when curled in both directions and in squiggly shapes.

When the drawing is pre-posed before rigging, the deformations will look pretty bad when you bend the shape against the existing curve.

I recommend this not just for tails and tentacles but also rope, chains, hair, etc...anything long drawing that needs a lot of flexibility during animation.

[mmmaarten]

...

Hi Greenlaw, I'd read your very helpful posts, but so far didn't have much time to dive into this further. I can say tho that I didn't have the issue on another project on the same computer. If I have more time to test this I'll let you know