Strange vanishing of actions

[Designspaceman]

Hello everybody, I build a complex character with lots of smartbone actions. I tested the rig in a kind of stress test. Everything worked as expected. Then I worked on other stuff of the project for let's say 6 month. Today I opened the character file again and to my surprise the actions partly are empty. I mean: all smartbomes and actions are there but some of them do not have any change to the character. This is very scary. The facial expressions were a huge amount of work. I looked into older revisions of the file and some of them still have the actions. Did anyone of you encounter similar problems? And if so, is there a easy way (hope always dies at last) to fix this?
Greetings, Steven

[Greenlaw]

I've never heard of this happening before, but that does sound scary. Which version of Moho are you using?

Long shot: If you have AutoSave for Crash Recovery Enabled, maybe an earlier version exists here:

C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Lost Marble\Moho Pro\[your Moho version]\Autosave

TBH, seeing that it's been six months since you last opened the file, it's unlikely to be there but still worth a look.

If not, I think you may need to reconstruct that version from the previous version you still have.

This doesn't help now, but out of habit, I save an incremental version about every 15-30 minutes or so, and any time I make a significant edit that I'm unsure about. This way I never lose more than a few minutes of work if catastrophe strikes. This advice is not specifically for Moho, I do this in every program I work in, and it's saved my butt more times than I can say. (Note: I started calling the 'Save As...' command 'Save Ass...' back in the early 90's after my cat Tiger walked over my keyboard and deleted hours of work for one of my first 3D illustration gigs.)

I prefer to do this manually becausezAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Msaqwz BV0----------------------------------------------------------

Ok, as if to illustrate a point, my cat Lucy just walked across my keyboard. Anyway, while I prefer to do this manually, there are a few Moho scripts that save incremental versions at timed intervals automatically. Here are two you can try:

Syn Auto Save

DV Backup


Hope this helps.

[Designspaceman]

Hey Greenlaw, thanks for your reply. Well, I got a little closer to the problem. It's not the actions (*sigh of relief*). The points of the mouth for example are (or should be) bound to pin bones. The pin bones are controlled by smart bones. Now those pin bones seem to have lost the connection to the points. This is also a mystery because it already had worked. So I will explore what is the reason for this. Also strange: I can not rebind the points. I don't even get the tool to do so...
I agree with you that "save often, save different" is important. And I save at least one time a day to a new name.
Greetings, Steven

[Greenlaw]

Hi Steven,

If a tool doesn't appear in the tool box when it's supposed to, that makes me wonder if there's a script conflict. Try temporarily disabling your third party scripts. (In your custom content folder, create a new folder in Tools and name it '_disabled'. Move all your third party scripts there, and then restart Moho.)

If the tool now appears and works as expected, then there may be a conflict with one of the third party ones we just disabled. The most likely thing is probably a mod of the tool if it exists (in this case, a mod for BInd Points I'm guessing,) but I suppose it could be anything. Process of elimination should find the problem script.

But before doing any of that, I would try these things

1. Check your bone strength. This doesn't matter if you're using Bind Point, but if Bind Point is not in effect and the strength is set to 0, the current binding will have no effect. (Well, unless you're using Bind Layer but I don't think you're doing that.)

2. Try resetting the binding for the problem layers. To do this, select the layers and then choose Reset All Layer Binding. This will reset the selected layers to their default Flex-binding mode. Now try try Bind Points (assuming you got your tool back.)

If these suggestions don't work for you, try disabling scripts as described above.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, before doing any of the above, let's get one thing out of the way: Do you have vector layers selected when binding points? This tool appears only when you have a vector layer selected and it doesn't appear when you have the bones layer selected.

That might seem obvious but check before doing any of the other stuff I mentioned.

[synthsin75]

Also check to see if you're not on frame zero and have this enabled: Edit>preferences>tools>enable only on frame zero