Rigging and smart bone question

[wulfax]

Hello,

This is my first post to this board and thank you in advance for your advice to what I am sure will be the first of many questions. Just a little background, I bought Moho 12 a few weeks ago as part of my mid-life crisis package. I plan to do some animation with my kids so we have a project to do that we can all enjoy together. I do have a modicum of artistic ability (enough that non-artists are impressed and little enough that real artists are like, “well he tried…”) and have a decent amount computer skill so learning new programs is not intimidating. Thus far, I am enjoying learning Moho. I have looked at quite a few tutorials online and as in everything, you learn a bit, but because they are not doing my specific project there are holes left in my knowledge base and I am enjoying figuring things out.

I have created a character that is more of a realistic style (athletic male w/o exaggerated features) and have rigged him up, point bound the different layers of his body, and set angle constraints on the bones. I am now messing around with smart bones to try to get the movement to look correct. I am currently working on his left arm, which leads me to my question.

The bone rig goes: Collar Bone --> Shoulder bone --> Upper Arm Bone. I have gotten the rig to act correctly when the arm crosses the torso in front, but when the arm is raised above the head I am having issues so I rigged it up using smart bones and it looked good. However when I went back to the main timeline the collar bone and shoulder bones move and the area that is under the arm is now separated from the torso.

So my question is, is there a way to rig more than one bone as a smart bone in the same movement? If not, what would be a good work around for this? I am at work so I cannot upload the file.

Once again, thank you for any advice.

[wulfax]

I have been browsing back through the pages and saw about six pages back or so in May someone asked just about this same question and no one responded to his post. So, my guess is that there is not a way to do the character the way I want. You can involve multiple bones in the smart bone action, but it messes with a lot of other motions, so I don't think there is a real way to do it, which is understandable.

One of my solution was to delete the shoulder and collar bone then manually adjust the shoulder muscles when the movement justifies it. I am still experimenting so I may come up with a different solution.

One of my other thoughts (I am at work so these are all mental exercises) is to leave the two bones in, but to re-parent the upper arm bone to the upper torso and not to the shoulder and collar bone. This way when I move the upper arm bone, it will not move the other two, but I will still have the rigging I need to do shrugs and so forth.

Thank you to those who took a look.

[synthsin75]

Hello,
The bone rig goes: Collar Bone --> Shoulder bone --> Upper Arm Bone. I have gotten the rig to act correctly when the arm crosses the torso in front, but when the arm is raised above the head I am having issues so I rigged it up using smart bones and it looked good. However when I went back to the main timeline the collar bone and shoulder bones move and the area that is under the arm is now separated from the torso.

So my question is, is there a way to rig more than one bone as a smart bone in the same movement? If not, what would be a good work around for this? I am at work so I cannot upload the file.

Any bone animated in a smart bone action will be controlled by that smart bone. You could also make each one it's own smart bone.

Really hard to guess at what your looking at without pics or a file though.

[funksmaname]

The upper arm should be a smart bone that fixes the arm pit when raised.
The lower arm should be a smart bone that fixes the elbow joint, and perhaps effects the muscles of the upper arm when bent.
The hand bone should be a smart bone that fixes the wrist when turned
... etc

To cover both directions of movement you can either set up two smart actions per bone (each turning clockwise, or anticlockwise), or set a single one that rotates from one extreme to the other (far anticlockwise on frame 1, far clockwise on...say...100)

I don't know if a shoulder bone is necessary - you should be able to parent the upper arm to the collar bone.

This video might help: