Bone changes in external reference

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mrc
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Bone changes in external reference

Post by mrc »

Hello, everyone,

I have a character with a bone rig in one file. I set up my scene in another file and import the character (ie. the bone layer) as a reference.

When I make changes to the vector layers of the character in the original file these changes carry through to the scene upon updating.

But when i make changes to the bone rig in the original file (eg. IK stretching values, bone positions, angles and length etc.) these changes are not reflected in the scene.

Is this a bug, or is it by design? How can i get around it?

Thanks for reading,
Marc
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synthsin75
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Re: Bone changes in external reference

Post by synthsin75 »

Technically, only animated properties are referenced.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Bone changes in external reference

Post by Greenlaw »

What Wes said. If it's not keyframeable, it's probably not going to update.

You're going to have to either adjust the imported rig to match the original or import a new reference (with the changes) to your project and then transfer any animations you created for the first reference (just copy/paste--it should go pretty quickly.) I might do one or the other depending on how big the changes are or how much animation has already been created.

The key thing is to get all that stuff nailed down before you start animating scenes. I know from experience that that's not always possible though. (Note: Sometimes an animator will have made their own changes to the reference rig in their project, so we don't dare update the reference in that case. At that point, we might even break the link so it doesn't get updated accidentally. Tip: Save a copy of your project before updating a reference rig. This way, if something goes horribly wrong in the update, you won't have lost any work.)

Anyway, while this isn't technically a bug, I'd like to see the reference system get more improvements in the future.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Thu Apr 04, 2019 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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synthsin75
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Re: Bone changes in external reference

Post by synthsin75 »

Greenlaw wrote:Anyway, while this isn't technically a bug, I'd like to see the reference system get more improvements in the future.
My number one reference improvement would be to allow vector references to follow bone influence without having to reference the bone layer too (like the old meshinstance script).
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