How can I toggle target bones with a smart bone?

[Ty505]

So sometimes I want the ragdoll-like physics that target bones brings, but other times I simply want to move my entire character but perhaps have the target bones follow along or not effect the rig. A prime example of this usage would be if you wanted to move / place the character in a different area of the scene. Is it possible to make an on/off switch for target bones?

[Greenlaw]

I'm not exactly sure what you're describing but you can pretty much control anything keyframeable using a Smart Bone, which includes switching Target bones on, off, or pointing to another target bone. Like so...



The trick is to keyframe the 'None' position as part of the Smart Bone Action...



In the above image, the two selected keyframes in this Smart Bone will untarget the large 'Pointer' bone, and the next keyframe targets it. I did this with two Actions (one to target A and one to target B) but you can actually do this within a single Smart Bone Action using keyframes for as many bones you wish to switch to.

Note that you can't directly keyframe to a 'None' target; you will first need to select another bone to target to create a target keyframe, and then you can change that keyframe to 'None'.

Here's the project file if you'd like to examine it...

TargetSBD.moho

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, normally I wouldn't bother with the above setup since you can easily retarget a bone using the Parent Bone tool. Just Alt click on the rig's bone to select it, the Ctrl click on the target bone to choose the target. Ctrl click an empty space to untarget the bone.

I often do this to target/untarget a hand bone when I need it to rest on the character's hip and stick there. (You can see that occurring in multiple shots on my demo reels.) No need for an SBD for that.

When moving a character to another location of the screen along with the target bones, just select the character's root and target bones and move them all at once. Or, if you have everything parented to a master bone, you can just move the master bone.

[Ty505]

I'm not exactly sure what you're describing but you can pretty much control anything keyframeable using a Smart Bone, which includes switching Target bones on, off, or pointing to another target bone. Like so...



The trick is to keyframe the 'None' position as part of the Smart Bone Action...



In the above image, the two selected keyframes in this Smart Bone will untarget the large 'Pointer' bone, and the next keyframe targets it. I did this with two Actions (one to target A and one to target B) but you can actually do this within a single Smart Bone Action using keyframes for as many bones you wish to switch to.

Note that you can't directly keyframe to a 'None' target; you will first need to select another bone to target to create a target keyframe, and then you can change that keyframe to 'None'.

Here's the project file if you'd like to examine it...

TargetSBD.moho

Hope this helps.

Awesome! That's exactly what I'm looking for - super helpful.

[Ty505]

Quick question. How did you get the labels to have boxes around them?

[Greenlaw]

Those are just Note layers. which are e handy for laying out Smart Bones UI. I like using them in switch layers too for on-screen descriptions of whatever a Smart Bone is doing (i.e., names of mouth shapes, etc.) Sometimes I'll use them in place of Bone labels because Note labels will stay in place and not jump around the way Bone labels do as you rotate the bone.

If you use Notes for UI labels, be sure to enable Enable Note Layer Scaling in Preferences. This will prevent the labels from crowding into each other when you zoom out.

You can, of course, use Text layers this way but I find Note layers can look cleaner, especially at small sizes. I imagine Note layers use less RAM/CPU than Text layers too.