Manipulate vs. Transform Bones

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nina_paley
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Manipulate vs. Transform Bones

Post by nina_paley »

I'm watching this fine tutorial by Victor: https://youtu.be/E5YRL1LA8Zc?t=24m10s
Here he switches from the "Manipulate" to the "Transform" tool. Why? I'm confused about how you how you keep track of both tools' keyframes in the timeline. It's tempting for me to use whichever tool I prefer at any given keyframe, but I suspect that is mucking up my work (there are so many possible causes of up-mucking I can only guess at this point).

What is a good, clean approach to choosing Manipulate vs. Transform, switching between them if necessary, and keeping track in the timeline?

Many thanks for enlightening me.
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Víctor Paredes
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Re: Manipulate vs. Transform Bones

Post by Víctor Paredes »

There are three main channels for bones: Rotation, Translation and Scale

Manipulate Bones tool creates keyframes for:
- Rotation
- Translation (if the bone has no parent)

Transform Bones tool creates keyframes for:
- Rotation
- Translation (if you drag the circle of its base)
- Scale (if you drag the circle of its tip)

There are also key modifiers for this tools, like Alt, Ctrl and Shift. You can read that info in the Status Bar.
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synthsin75
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Re: Manipulate vs. Transform Bones

Post by synthsin75 »

The only major reason to use the manipulate bone tool is to animated an IK chain without having to animate each bone in the chain individually.
ddrake
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Re: Manipulate vs. Transform Bones

Post by ddrake »

nina_paley wrote:Why? I'm confused about how you how you keep track of both tools' keyframes in the timeline. It's tempting for me to use whichever tool I prefer at any given keyframe, but I suspect that is mucking up my work (there are so many possible causes of up-mucking I can only guess at this point).
Not sure if I'm helping or adding more confusion at this point, but the other responses were certainly accurate. What I would add or reiterate is that there are only 3 channels to keep track of bone keyframes: Rotation, Scale, and Translation. Regardless of the tool you use, those are the only keyframes to keep track of.

The "Transform" tool covers all of those channels in one tool depending on where you hover, click and move. But it will isolate that movement and add a keyframe to THAT SPECIFIC bone.

If the concern is mucking up, I'd steer clear of "Manipulate Bones," unless as Synthsin said, you're wanting to use the IK chain, which will rotate other bones in the chain based on that manipulation.

On the other hand, if that IS preferable, you can avoid some up-mucking by using the "Freeze Pose" option to keyframe all channels in the timeline on all bones in that bone layer for the poses you want before IK manipulation. At least that way, you're not suddenly keying a bone that hasn't moved since frame 1.

Freeze pose: PC - (ctrl-F) ... Actually not sure on Mac sorry :( I'll look for that now.
-ddrake
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