Flipping "copied" parented bones in one bone layer

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heyvern
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Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2005 4:49 am

Flipping "copied" parented bones in one bone layer

Post by heyvern »

I have a somewhat complex rig involving the interaction of two characters.

Due to the overlapping interaction I need the leg and arm of one character to be behind the the other while the other leg and arm are in front...

I was able to achieve this fine by putting two sets of skeletal rigs for both characters in the same bone layer.

I had to do this so that I could reorder the layers of one character and still have the bones controlling it.

If I have two bone layers, I can't put the leg layer behind the other bone layer and the arm layer in front... so... both characters... all the bones... one layer. All shape layers of both characters children of this bone layer.

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Here's the tricky part. I want to "copy" the bones of a nicely completed character skeleton and "flip it" horizontally.... not worried as much about the mesh. That is fairly straight forward... tedious but straight forward.

Flipping the bones is a totally different matter since... well... there is no way to flip a bone along with the children on the horizontal.

I tried using the "Clone Bones" script... but... it doesn't do horizontal flipping... and for some odd reason is rotating the bones around in odd ways.

I was able to "copy" the skeleton and paste it in using a text editor in the Moho file format without trouble. But I have no idea how to universally flip the bones horizontally so I can just import and flip the shapes and line them up.

Any advice or guidance... tips tricks... dearly appreciated.

VZ
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BA
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Post by BA »

here's a tip for a different way of doing it:

leave your characters separate. Animate them interacting with each other, without worrying about the way they overlap. Just get the action exactly the way you want it.

Then - once you're happy with the animation and it's 'locked' - make duplicates of your characters. change the visibility of the layers inside so that one of them just displays the arm and leg, or whatever. Then you can put your layer with character A's arm and leg animation on top of character B - and so on. As long as you don't change the animation after you do this, the extra layers should match up perfectly.

I hope that made sense - I think it is a much easier solution than trying to merge your characters into one bone layer.
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heyvern
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Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2005 4:49 am

Post by heyvern »

Thanks BA.

However... I really enjoy having access to both (or more) characters bones in one layer.

I can see how everything relates... easy to modify quickly.

As a matter of fact... it will even be worth the effort of "doing it by hand".

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Similar to your technique suggestion I had thought of using separate bone layers for each "limb" or "part".

This would work, but of course... lots of layer switching to animate the bones.

Plus I could link a "sub" bone layer to another bone so that the relationships are the same... move the hip and the leg "bone layer" moves and rotates with it.


V
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