Copy-Paste Bone Keyframes to another bone

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Daxel
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Joined: Wed Mar 27, 2019 8:34 pm

Copy-Paste Bone Keyframes to another bone

Post by Daxel »

Today I discovered something that I'm sure some of you already know, but I wasn't able to find this information anywhere and it took me a year to discover, so here you have it in case it could help someone like me.

You can copy and paste bone keyframes (its rotation, position, etc) to a different bone. A totally different bone, that is not a copy of the first, doesn't have the same name and it doesn't need to be in the same bone layer or even the same timeline, so you can do it from one smartaction to another. The only thing you have to do is to select the first bone before copying the keyframes (to ensure you don't copy any other thing) and the most important thing is to select the second bone right before pasting the keyframes, because that tells Moho to paste it on that particular bone.

Can I do this selecting multiple bones, to save time? Yes, I don't know how but it works.


Problems and solutions:

If you copy and paste bone position keyframes, the position of the second bone will be exactly the position of the first, and usually you only want to copy the movement but not the same final position. To solve that, use Edit - Paste relative instead of using the normal paste.

The rotation usually works like a charm, but again if the squeletons are not exactly the same, you may find that the rotation keyframe of the bone puts the second bone in the same angle but goes there rotating to the right istead of the left. That happens because the bones are not the same in keyframe 0, so to solve that you can use this same technique to copy and paste the 0 rotation keyframe of the first bone to the second.

Hope that helped!
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Víctor Paredes
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Re: Copy-Paste Bone Keyframes to another bone

Post by Víctor Paredes »

Jeremy from Cartoon Saloon just showed me that feature a couple months ago! I had no idea. I'm using it a lot now, exactly with the process you describe, using Paste relative (Ctrl+Shift+V, in my computer).
Currently I'm animating a lot of plants which need to react to character passing. Each plant is made by a simple chain of three bones. I animated the base bone using the elastic feature (so the plant rotation bounces when touched by the character). Once I had the exact moment I wanted, I copied those keys and pasted relatively to the next bone, but a few frames later. This works for follow through.
Then I repeated the pasting for the next bone. And then for every plant.

The good part of making the bouncing by using an elastic key, is that I can modify the angle the bone is rotating without losing its bounciness. So, for instance, the character moves some plants pushing them to the right and others are pushed to the left.
Sadly, I can't share the file here, but here is an example just using bones.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m14vybvo9xk4g ... .moho?dl=0

And here is the graph of the simple bounce. The first and last key are both in the initial angle. The key in the middle can be modified, even rotated in the opposite direction, but it always keep the same bounciness.
You can simply copy those keys and paste them into any other bone/plant
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Daxel
Posts: 967
Joined: Wed Mar 27, 2019 8:34 pm

Re: Copy-Paste Bone Keyframes to another bone

Post by Daxel »

That's very cool. I have only started to play with moho physics but they are very interesting.
I discovered the copy-paste bone keyframes feature when I tried to make a lot of identical smartbones to control the Z-scale of each layer and therefore the layer order with the fantastic "sort by Z-scale" script from lukas:
https://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=33324

I'm finding that way of sorting layers very powerful and easy to animate.
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